3  182202689  9633 


LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF 
CAUH9RNIA 

SAN  DIEGO     j 


NIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA.  SAN  D  E|G 


3  1822026899633 


LHSaron  K. 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS.     i6mo,   Ji.oo  nit. 
Postage  extra. 

SCHOOL.  COLLEGE,    AND    CHARACTER. 
i6rao,  Si. oo  net.    Postage  8  cents. 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  &  COMPANY 
BOSTON  AND  NEW  YORK 


ROUTINE  AND  IDEALS 


ROUTINE  AND 
IDEALS 

• 

By  LeBaron  Russell  Briggs 


BOSTON   AND   NEW  YORK 
HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN  AND  COMPANY 

£bc  ilitjcrsiDe  press,  CambribQr 
1904 


COPYRIGHT  1904   BY    LE  BARON    RUSSELL   BRIGGS 
ALL    RIGHTS    RESERVED 


Published  November,  rqo<f 


TO  ADAMS  SHERMAN  HILL 

EVERY  PART  OF  THIS  BOOK  THA  T  WILL  BEAR 
HIS  SCRUTINY  IS  AFFECTION  A  TELY  DEDICA  TED 


PREFACE 

OF  the  papers  collected  in  this  volume  the 
"  Commencement  Address  at  Wellesley 
College "  has  been  printed  in  pamphlet 
form;  the  "Address  to  the  School  Chil- 
dren of  Concord  "  appears  in  the  memo- 
rial volume  issued  by  The  Social  Circle 
in  Concord  and  is  reprinted  with  the  per- 
mission of  John  Shepard  Keyes,  Esq. ; 
"  The  Mistakes  of  College  Life  "  belongs 
in  a  volume  of  Belmont  (California) 
School  Talks  and  is  printed  here  with 
the  permission  of  Mr.  William  T.  Reid ; 
"Harvard  and  the  Individual"  is  re- 
printed from  the  Boston  Transcript  with 
the  permission  of  Mr.  E.  H.  Clement ; 
and  "  Mater  Fortissima  "  has  appeared 
in  the  Harvard  Graduates'  Magazine. 

The  book, like  its  predecessor,  "School, 
College,  and  Character,"  contains  no 
new  ideas  and  only  a  few  old  ones.  In 


viii  PREFACE 

this  respect  it  is  much  like  other  collec- 
tions of  sermons  —  for  that  the  addresses 
are  sermons  there  is  no  denying.  Ser- 
mons or  a  single  sermon  ;  and  the  text 
is  twofold  :  "Be  thou  faithful  unto  death," 
and  "  Where  there  is  no  vision  the  peo- 
ple perish." 

L.  B.  R.  BRIGGS. 

CAMBRIDGE,  September,  1904. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

I.  ROUTINE    AND  IDEALS :    A   SCHOOL    AND 

COLLEGE  ADDRESS i 

II.  HARVARD  AND  THE  INDIVIDUAL    .        .  39 

III.  ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL  CHILDREN  OF 

CONCORD 63 

IV.  COMMENCEMENT    ADDRESS    AT  WELLES- 

LEY  COLLEGE 91 

V.  DISCIPLINE  IN  SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE     .  137 

VI.  THE  MISTAKES  OF  COLLEGE  LIFE   .        .  183 

VII.  MATER  FORTISSIMA 223 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

A  SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE  ADDRESS 

THE  older  I  grow,  the  more  strongly  I 
feel  that  the  best  thing  in  man  or  wo- 
man is  being  "  there"  Physical  bravery, 
which  is  always  inspiring,  is  surprisingly 
common  ;  but  the  sure  and  steady  quality 
of  being  "  there  "  belongs  to  compara- 
tively few.  This  is  why  we  hear  on  every 
hand,  "  If  you  want  a  thing  well  done, 
do  it  yourself; "  not  because  the  man  who 
wants  it  done  is  best  able  to  do  it,  but 
because  to  many  persons  it  seems  a  hope- 
less quest  to  look  for  any  one  who  cares 
enough  for  them,  who  can  put  himself 
vigorously  enough  into  their  places,  to 
give  them  his  best,  to  give  them  intelli- 
gent, unremitting,  loyal  service  until  the 
job  is  done,  —  not  half  done,  or  nine 


4         ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

tenths  done,  or  ninety-nine  hundredths 
done,  but  done,  with  intelligence  and  de- 
votion in  every  nail  he  drives,  or  every 
comma  he  writes.  Some  are  reluctant, 
some  afraid  of  doing  more  than  they  are 
paid  for,  some  indifferent,  some  obli- 
gingly helpful  but  not  well  trained  and 
not  so  deeply  devoted  as  to  train  them- 
selves. I  suppose  that  in  one  sphere  of 
life  or  another  a  number  of  these  persons 
earn  what  they  get.  Yet  sometimes  I 
think  there  are  only  two  kinds  of  ser- 
vice, —  that  which  is  not  worth  having 
at  any  price,  and  that  for  which  no 
money  can  pay.  All  of  us  know  a  few 
who  give  this  latter  kind  of  service,  and 
know  what  they  are  to  us,  and  to  every 
one  with  whom  they  deal.  These  are 
the  people  who  are  "  there." 

Now  being  "there"  is  the  result  of 
three  things,  —  intelligence,  constant 
practice,  and  something  hard  to  define 
but  not  too  fancifully  called  an  ideal.  Of 
intelligence  everybody  can  see  the  need  ; 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS         5 

but  not  everybody  knows  how  little 
quickness  of  mind  is  required.  As  Sena- 
tor Hoar  once  told  the  highest  scholars 
in  Harvard  College,  much  of  the  good 
work  in  the  world  has  been  that  of  dull 
men  who  have  done  their  best.  Moder- 
ate intelligence,  with  devotion  behind  it, 
and  with  constant  exercise  in  the  right 
direction,  has  produced  some  of  the  most 
valuable  among  men  and  women. 

The  best  thing  education  can  do  is  to 
make  moral  character  efficient  through 
mental  discipline.  Here  we  come  to  the 
need  of  training,  and  to  the  question 
whether  the  education  of  to-day  trains 
boys  and  girls  (I  do  not  say  as  it  should, 
but  as  it  might)  for  thorough,  and  re- 
sponsible, and  unselfish  work. 

Professor  A.  S.  Hill  cautions  writers 
against  "  announcing  platitudes  as  if 
they  were  oracles,"  and  against  "  apolo- 
gizing for  them  as  if  they  were  original 
sin."  I  am  in  danger  of  both  these  trans- 
gressions. In  proclaiming  that  there  is  no 


6         ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

education  without  hard  work,  I  may  seem 
to  proclaim  a  platitude  of  the  first  water  ; 
yet  you  can  hardly  call  any  proposition 
a  platitude  if  its  acceptance  depends  on 
its  interpretation.  To  me  the  proposi- 
tion means,  nobody  can  get  an  education 
without  working  for  it ;  to  some  others 
it  appears  to  mean,  nobody  can  get  an 
education  without  other  people's  work- 
ing to  give  it  to  him,  or  even  to  make 
him  like  it  well  enough  to  take  it ;  and 
my  interpretation,  that  he  cannot  get  it 
without  working  hard  himself,  though  it 
strikes  me  as  so  obvious  that  I  am  half 
ashamed  to  mention  it,  strikes  others  as 
a  reversion  to  a  narrow  and  harsh  con- 
servatism, to  the  original  sin  of  a  time 
when  an  education  was  a  Procrustes 
bed,  which  now  strained  and  stretched 
the  mind  until  it  broke,  and  now  lopped 
every  delicate  outgrowth  of  the  soul. 

Of  all  discoveries  in  modern  education 
the  most  beautiful  is  the  recognition  of 
individual  need  and  individual  claim, 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS         7 

of  the  infinite  and  fascinating  variety  in 
human  capacity,  of  the  awful  responsi- 
bility for  those  who  by  the  pressure  of 
dull  routine  would  stifle  a  human  soul, 
of  the  almost  divine  mission  for  those 
who  help  a  human  soul  into  the  fulness 
of  life.  For  what  is  nearer  the  divine 
than  to  see  that  a  child  has  life,  and 
has  it  more  abundantly?  "The  past  was 
wrong,"  says  the  educator  of  to-day;  "  let 
us  right  it.  Education  has  been  dark 
and  cruel ;  let  us  make  it  bright  and 
kind."  Thus  it  comes  to  pass  that,  as 
many  a  prosperous  father  whose  boy- 
hood was  pinched  by  poverty  is  deter- 
mined that  his  son  shall  not  suffer  as  he 
himself  has  suffered,  and  throws  away 
on  him  money  which  he  in  turn  throws 
away  on  folly  and  on  vice,  —  as  such  a 
father  saps  a  young  man's  strength  in 
trying  to  be  generous,  so  does  many 
an  educator  of  to-day,  atoning  for  the 
cruelty  of  the  past  by  the  enervating 
luxury  of  the  present,  sap  a  child's 


8         ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

strength  in  trying  to  be  kind,  change  a 
Procrustes  bed  to  a  bed  of  roses.  Cruel 
as  it  is  to  assume  that  a  boy  or  a  girl 
who  is  dull  in  one  or  two  prescribed 
subjects  is  a  dunce,  it  may  be  equally 
cruel  to  watch  every  inclination  of  the 
young  mind,  and  to  bend  school  re- 
quirements to  its  desires  and  whims. 
How  many  persons  we  know  whose 
lives  and  whose  friends'  lives  are  em- 
bittered because  they  have  had  from 
childhood  their  own  way,  and  who,  if 
their  eyes  are  once  opened  to  the  sel- 
fishness of  their  position,  denounce  the 
weakness  of  those  who  in  their  child- 
hood yielded  to  them  !  Unless  we  aban- 
don as  obsolete  the  notion  that  children 
are  the  better  for  obedience,  why  should 
we  give  them  full  swing  in  the  choice 
of  a  time  for  doing  sums  or  for  learning 
to  read  ?  If  we  do  not  insist  that  a  boy 
shall  brush  his  hair  till  he  longs  to  have 
it  smooth,  and  if  then  we  brush  it  for 
him,  we  are  not  educating  him  in  either 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS         9 

neatness  or  efficiency;  and  for  aught 
I  can  se'e,  the  analogy  holds  good.  I 
once  knew  a  boy  of  sixteen  or  seven- 
teen whose  mother  had  done  most  of 
his  reading  for  him.  His  eyes  were 
sharp  enough  for  things  he  liked  (such 
as  turtles  and  snakes) ;  but  he  had 
trained  them  so  little  in  the  alphabet  that 
in  Latin  he  was  quite  impartial  in  decid- 
ing whether  u  followed  by  t  was  ut  or 
tn.  The  effect  on  his  translation  may  be 
easily  conceived.  I  do  not  mean  that  he 
made  this  particular  mistake  many  times  ; 
I  mean  that  he  was  constantly  making 
mistakes  of  this  character  ;  that  in  general 
he  had  not  been  trained  to  observe  just 
what  were  the  letters  before  him,  or  in 
what  order  they  came.  Why  then  teach 
him  Latin?  He  was  to  be  a  scientific 
man,  and  needed  some  language  beside 
his  own  :  yet  how  could  he  learn  a  foreign 
language  ?  how  could  he  learn  his  own 
language  ?  how  could  he  learn  anything 
from  a  book  ?  how  was  he  training  him- 


io       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

self  to  be  "there"?  "Do  not  make  a 
child  read,"  some  educators  say,  "  until 
he  finds  the  need  of  reading,  and  learns 
for  his  own  pleasure.  Do  not  enfeeble 
his  mind  by  forcing  it"  "  Do  not  en- 
feeble his  mind,"  one  might  answer,  "by 
letting  it  go  undisciplined."  If  he  begins 
late,  when  he  has  felt  the  need,  he  may 
learn  to  read  rapidly ;  but  will  he  have 
the  patience  for  those  small  accuracies 
which  form  the  basis  of  accuracy  in  later 
life,  and  which,  unless  learned  early,  are 
seldom  learned  at  all  ?  Do  not  give  the 
child  long  hours  ;  do  not  take  away  the 
freshness  of  his  mind  by  pressing  him ; 
go  slowly,  but  go  thoroughly.  Teach 
him,  whatever  he  does,  to  do  it  as  well 
as  he  can.  Then  show  him  how  next 
time  he  can  do  better ;  and  when  next 
time  comes,  make  him  do  better.  How- 
ever short  the  school  hours  may  be, 
however  much  outside  of  the  school  may 
rouse  or  charm  his  mind,  make  him  feel 
that  school  standards  are  high,  that 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       n 

school  work  is  to  be  done,  and  done  well. 
If  you  are  teaching  a  girl  to  sweep,  you 
do  not  let  her  sweep  the  lint  under  the 
table.  Why,  if  you  are  teaching  a  child 
to  study,  should  you  let  him  study  in  a 
slovenly  way  ?  Why,  for  instance,  should 
you  teach  him  reading  without  spelling  ? 
Get  into  him  as  early  as  you  can  a  habit 
of  thoroughness  as  an  end  in  itself,  of 
thoroughness  for  its  own  sake,  and  he 
will  soon  find  that  being  thorough  is 
interesting;  that  against  the  pain  of 
working  when  he  feels  indolent,  he  may 
match  the  pain  of  not  doing  what  ought 
to  be  done,  just  as  one  kind  of  microbe 
is  injected  to  kill  another.  When  he 
once  gets  this  habit  firmly  fixed  in  him 
(I  may  say,  when  it  has  once  fixed  itself 
upon  him),  he  may  have  all  sorts  of  in- 
tellectual freedom  and  be  safe. 

Immature  people  constantly  cry  out 
against  routine.  Yet  routine  is  an  almost 
necessary  condition  of  effective  human 
life.  An  undisciplined  genius,  like  Shel- 


12       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

ley's,  inspires  now  and  then  ;  a  spirit  like 
Milton's,  as  eager  for  liberty,  and  as 
impatient  of  bondage,  yet  forced,  by  the 
man  it  animated,  to  do  his  bidding, 
which  rightly  or  wrongly  he  believed  to 
be  the  bidding  of  God,  inspires  oftener 
and  deeper.  If  routine  is  forced  upon  us, 
we  are  delivered  from  the  great  tempta- 
tion of  letting  industry  become  a  matter 
of  caprice,  and  of  waiting  for  perfect 
mental  and  physical  conditions  (Italiam 
fugientem )  before  we  settle  down  to  our 
work.  If  routine  is  not  forced  upon  us, 
we  must  force  it  upon  ourselves,  or  we 
shall  go  to  pieces.  "  Professor  X  is  a 
dry  teacher.  Shakspere  is  the  greatest 
of  poets,  and  hence  one  of  the  greatest 
inspirers  of  men.  Why  is  n't  it  better  to 
cut  Professor  X's  lecture  and  read  Shak- 
spere, —  or  even  to  read  Kipling  ?"  First 
and  obviously,  because  you  can  read 
Shakspere  at  another  time,  whereas  Pro- 
fessor X's  lecture  is  given  at  a  fixed  hour, 
is  part  of  a  course,  and  a  link  in  an  im- 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS       13 

portant  chain.  Next,  because  attending 
Professor  X's  lecture  is  for  the  time  be- 
ing your  business.  The  habit  of  attend- 
ing to  business  is  a  habit  you  must  form 
and  keep,  before  you  can  be  regarded 
as  "there."  Moreover  this  habit  does 
away  with  all  manner  of  time-wasting 
indecision.  If  you  take  the  hour  for 
Shakspere,  you  may  spend  half  of  it 
in  questioning  what  play  to  begin,  or 
whether  to  read  another  author  after  all, 
—  and  meantime  a  friend  drops  in.  "I 
know  a  person,"  says  Professor  James, 
"  who  will  poke  the  fire,  set  chairs  straight, 
pick  dust-specks  from  the  floor,  arrange 
his  table,  snatch  up  the  newspaper,  take 
down  any  book  which  catches  his  eye, 
trim  his  nails,  waste  the  morning  any- 
how, in  short,  and  all  without  premedi- 
tation, —  simply  because  the  one  thing 
he  ought  to  attend  to  is  the  preparation 
of  a  noon-day  lesson  in  formal  logic 
which  he  detests  —  anything  but  that!  " 
It  is  astonishing  how  eagerly  men  strug- 


14       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

gle  to  escape  from  the  training  that  pre- 
pares them  for  life,  how  they  labor  to 
convince  themselves  that  what  they  long 
to  do  is  worthier  and  nobler  than  what 
they  ought  to  do  —  and  must  do  if  they 
are  to  succeed  in  what  they  long  to  do. 
I  once  knew  a  student,  against  all  ad- 
vice, to  leave  college  in  the  middle  of 
the  Freshman  year,  because,  since  he 
was  going  into  the  ministry,  he  was 
eager  to  devote  his  whole  time  to  the 
Bible.  Later  he  saw  his  mistake,  and 
came  back.  I  knew  another  and  a  wiser 
student  who,  having  gone  into  the  min- 
istry without  a  college  education,  left  it 
for  years  of  sacrifice  in  money  and  of  the 
hardest  kind  of  work,  to  win  that  know- 
ledge of  books  and  men  without  which 
no  modern  minister  is  equipped  for  effi- 
cient service.  The  efficient  people  are 
those  who  know  their  business  and  do  it 
promptly  and  patiently,  who  when  lei- 
sure comes  have  earned  it,  and  know 
they  have  earned  it ;  who  when  one 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS       15 

thing  is  done  can  turn  their  attention 
squarely  and  completely  to  the  next 
thing,  and  do  that.  The  efficient  student 
is  he  who  has  as  nearly  as  possible  a 
fixed  time  for  every  part  of  his  work ; 
who,  if  he  has  a  recitation  at  ten  and 
another  at  twelve,  knows  in  advance 
what  he  is  to  study  at  eleven.  He  has 
most  time  for  work  and  most  time  for 
unalloyed  play,  since  he  makes  use  of 
that  invaluable  friend  to  labor, — routine. 
"  Habit,"  says  the  Autocrat  of  the  Break- 
fast Table,  "is  a  labor-saving  invention 
which  enables  a  man  to  get  along  with 
less  fuel, — that  is  all;  for  fuel  is  force, 
you  know,  just  as  much  in  the  page  I 
am  writing  for  you  as  in  the  locomo- 
tive or  the  legs  which  carry  it  to  you." 
"  Habit,"  says  Professor  James, "simplifies 
our  movements,  makes  them  accurate, 
and  diminishes,  fatigue."  "  Man, "  he 
continues,  "  is  born  with  a  tendency  to 
do  more  things  than  he  has  ready-made 
arrangements  for  in  his  nerve-centres. 


16       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

Most  of  the  performances  of  other  animals 
are  automatic.  But  in  him  the  number  of 
them  is  so  enormous  that  most  of  them 
must  be  the  fruit  of  painful  study.  If 
practice  did  not  make  perfect,  nor  habit 
economize  the  expense  of  nervous  and 
muscular  energy,  he  would  be  in  a  sorry 
plight.  As  Dr.  Maudsley  says :  '  If  an 
act  became  no  easier  after  being  done 
several  times,  if  the  careful  direction  of 
consciousness  were  necessary  to  its  ac- 
complishment on  each  occasion,  it  is 
evident  that  the  whole  activity  of  a  life- 
time might  be  confined  to  one  or  two 
deeds — that  no  progress  could  take  place 
in  development.  A  man  might  be  oc- 
cupied all  day  in  dressing  and  undress- 
ing himself ;  the  attitude  of  his  body 
would  absorb  all  his  attention  and  en- 
ergy ;  the  washing  of  his  hands  or  the 
fastening  of  a  button  would  be  as  diffi- 
cult to  him  on  each  occasion  as  to  the 
child  on  its  first  trial ;  and  he  would, 
furthermore,  be  completely  exhausted  by 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       17 

his  exertions.'  '"  "  The  great  thing,  then, 
in  all  education,"  says  Professor  James, 
"is  to  make  our  nervous  system  our  ally 
instead  of  our  enemy.  It  is  to  fund  and 
capitalize  our  acquisitions,  and  live  at 
ease  upon  the  interest  of  the  fund.  For 
this  we  must  make  automatic  and  habit- 
ual, as  early  as  possible,  as  many  useful 
actions  as  we  can,  and  guard  against 
the  growing  into  ways  that  are  likely 
to  be  disadvantageous  to  us,  as  we 
should  guard  against  the  plague.  The 
more  of  the  details  of  our  daily  life  we 
can  hand  over  to  the  effortless  custody 
of  automatism,  the  more  our  higher 
powers  of  mind  will  be  set  free  for  their 
own  proper  work.  There  is  no  more 
miserable  human  being  than  one  in 
whom  nothing  is  habitual  but  indeci- 
sion. .  .  .  Full  half  the  time  of  such  a 
man  goes  to  the  deciding,  or  regretting,  of 
matters  which  ought  to  be  so  ingrained 
in  him  as  practically  not  to  exist  for  his 
consciousness  at  all.  If  there  be  such 


i8       ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

daily  duties  not  yet  ingrained  in  any  one 
of  my  readers,  let  him  begin  this  very 
hour  to  set  the  matter  right." 

All  this  shows  the  true  meaning  of 
thoroughness.  I  have  heard  it  said  that 
thoroughness  in  education  is  precisely 
what  we  do  not  want,  since  thorough 
work  becomes  mechanical  work,  and 
robs  the  student  of  that  creative  joy 
which  should  accompany  every  exercise 
of  the  mind.  Yet  it  is  the  "effortless 
custody  of  automatism "  in  the  lower 
things  that  frees  the  mind  for  creative 
joy  in  the  higher.  The  pianist  who 
cannot  through  long  practice  commit 
to  routine  all  the  ordinary  movements  of 
the  fingers  on  the  keys  can  never  play 
the  music  of  Schumann  or  of  Beethoven. 
Sometimes  I  think  that  our  happiness 
depends  chiefly  on  our  cheerful  accept- 
ance of  routine,  on  our  refusal  to  as- 
sume, as  many  do,  that  daily  work  and 
daily  duty  are  a  kind  of  slavery.  If 
we  can  learn  to  think  of  routine  as 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       19 

the  best  economy,  we  shall  not  despise 
it  People  call  it  benumbing ;  and  so  it 
is  if  we  do  not  understand  it :  but  if  we 
understand  that  through  it  we  can  do 
more  work  in  less  time,  and  have  more 
time  left  for  the  expansion  of  our  souls, 
that  through  it  we  cultivate  the  habit 
which  makes  people  know  we  can  be 
counted  on,  we  shall  cease  to  say  hard 
things  of  it.  Even  in  those  whose  lives 
are  narrowly  circumscribed,  we  see  the 
splendid  courage  and  fidelity  which 
come  with  faithful  routine.  The  longer 
I  live,  the  more  I  admire  as  a  class  the 
women  who  fill  small  positions  in  New 
England  public  schools,  the  typical 
schoolmistresses  or  "  schoolmarms "  of 
our  more  Puritanical  towns  and  villages. 
Their  notions  of  English  grammar  are 
as  inflexible  as  their  notions  of  duty ; 
like  Overbury's  Pedant,  they  "  dare  not 
think  a  thought  that  the  nominative 
case  governs  not  the  verb  ; "  their  theo- 
logy may  be  as  narrow  as  their  philology ; 


20       ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

they  have  little  primnesses  that  make  us 
smile :  but  they  have  the  hearts  of  hero- 
ines. Pitifully  paid,  often  with  others  to 
support,  often  subject  to  ignorant  and 
wrong-headed  committees,  and  obliged 
against  every  instinct  to  adopt  new 
methods  when  education  is  periodically 
overhauled,  often  with  little  physical 
health,  and  living  on  courage  and  "  wire," 
with  few  social  diversions  higher  than 
the  Sunday  School  picnic,  and  few  hopes 
of  rest  in  this  world  higher  than  the  Home 
for  Aged  Women,  they  are  at  their  posts 
day  by  day,  week  by  week,  year  by  year, 
because  they  are,  as  Milton  said  of 
Cromwell, 

"Guided  by  faith  and  matchless  fortitude." 

What  is  more  inspiring  than  the  men  and 
women  who  are  "there,"  and  "there" 
not  in  the  high  and  ambitious  moments 
of  life,  but  on  the  obscure  dead  levels 
that  take  the  heart  out  of  any  one 
who  does  not  see  the  glory  of  common 
things  ? 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS       21 

These  schoolmistresses,  though  they 
may  not  know  it,  illustrate  the  absolute 
necessity  of  routine  for  steadily  effective 
living.  In  little  things  they  may  show 
the  hard  and  wooden  quality  of  a  mind 
that  works  in  the  treadmill  day  after 
day,  and  may  thus  give  a  handle  to  those 
critics  who  scoff  at  routine ;  but  if  their 
small  accuracies  seem  pretentiously  lit- 
tle, their  devotion  is  unpretentiously 
great.  Through  habit,  supported  by  un- 
yielding conscience,  they  have  forced 
upon  themselves  a  routine  without  which 
they  could  not  live. 

A  boy  when  he  meets  with  loss  or 
grief  or  disaster,  or  even  when  he  feels 
the  excitement  of  joyful  expectation,  is 
likely  to  stop  work  altogether.  He  has 
"  no  heart  for  it,"  he  says ;  he  "  cannot 
do  it."  A  young  man  crossed  in  love,  a 
young  woman  who  loses  father,  mother, 
or  bosom  friend  —  these  may  pine  and 
fret,  and  suffer  the  sorrow  for  days,  or 
weeks,  or  months,  to  stop  their  lives, 


22       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

may  cease  to  live  except  as  burdens  to 
themselves  and  others ;  but,  young  or 
old,  a  trained  man  or  woman  whose 
heart  and  will  are  strong  keeps  on. 
There  is  always  somebody  or  something 
to  work  for  ;  and  while  there  is,  life  must 
be,  and  shall  become,  worth  living.  "  In 
summer  or  winter,"  said  the  proud  ad- 
vertisement of  an  old  steamboat  line, 
"  In  summer  or  winter,  in  storm  or  calm, 
the  Commonwealth  and  the  Plymouth 
Rock  invariably  make  the  passage;" 
and  this  should  be  the  truth  about  you 
and  me. 

The  use  of  routine  to  make  a  sad  life 
endurable  was  once  brought  clearly  be- 
fore my  mind  as  I  watched  the  polar 
bears  in  the  Zoological  Garden  at  Cen- 
tral Park.  In  a  kind  of  grotto  cut  in  a 
hillside,  two  polar  bears  were  caged. 
Two  sides  of  the  cage  were  of  sheer 
rock ;  two  were  of  iron,  one  separating 
the  polar  bears  from  the  grizzly  bears, 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       23 

and  one  separating  them  from  the  spec- 
tators in  the  Park.  The  floor  of  the 
grotto  between  the  steep  rock  and  the 
pool  of  water  which  represented  the  Arc- 
tic Ocean  was  narrow ;  but  on  it  one  of 
the  bears  was  exercising  with  a  rhythmic 
motion  strange  and  inexpressibly  sad. 
He  moved  from  the  centre  of  the  grotto 
two  or  three  steps  toward  the  rock, 
swung  his  head  wide  and  low  three 
times  to  the  right  and  three  times  to  the 
left,  with  a  sweep  like  that  of  a  scythe, 
stepped  back  two  or  three  paces,  com- 
pleting a  sort  of  ellipse,  stepped  forward 
again,  swung  his  head  right  and  left 
again  three  times,  precisely  as  before,  — 
then  back,  then  forward,  then  swinging, 
on  and  on  and  on.  At  intervals,  whether 
with  numerical  precision  or  not  I  cannot 
say,  he  broke  his  circuit,  walked  to  the 
iron  fence  between  him  and  the  grizzly 
bears,  walked  back,  and  began  once 
more  the  round  of  motions  devised,  as  it 
seemed,  to  save  him  from  madness  or 


24       ROUTINE   AND    IDEALS 

from  death.  Three  times  that  day  I  vis- 
ited him ;  and  always  I  found  him  at  his 
self  -  appointed  task,  —  forward,  swing, 
back,  forward,  swing,  back,  on  and  on 
and  on.  The  rocky  bottom  of  his  den 
was  worn  into  holes  where,  always  in  the 
same  spots,  he  set  his  feet  in  this  forlorn 
attempt  to  put  a  saving  routine  into  a 
hopeless  life.  Near  him,  in  a  narrow 
house  with  a  little  window-like  door,  a 
small  brown  bear  moved  round  and 
round,  casting  one  quick,  sharp  glance 
at  the  outer  world  in  every  round,  as  he 
walked  briskly  by  the  door ;  and  in  a 
neighboring  house  a  hyena  strode  angrily 
back  and  forth,  and  back  and  forth,  and 
back  and  forth  again.  Here  were  captive 
animals  finding  in  routine  the  nearest 
possible  approach  to  an  enrichment  of 
their  lives. 

The  reaction  against  routine  in  mod- 
ern education,  the  notion  that  children 
should  be  pleased  with  a  variety  of  sub- 
jects made  easy  and  interesting,  rather 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS        25 

than  drilled  in  a  few,  and  roused  to  in- 
terest themselves  in  these  few  and  in 
the  thoroughness  that  drill  demands,  ac- 
counts, I  believe,  in  large  measure  for 
the  collapse  of  many  a  student's  will  be- 
fore any  subject  that  requires  hard  math- 
ematical thinking.  In  Harvard  College 
an  elementary  course  in  philosophy  used 
to  begin  with  lectures  on  psychology, 
which  fascinated  the  class;  but  "oh, 
the  heavy  change  "  when  in  the  second 
half-year  psychology  gave  place  to  logic  1 
The  text  -  book,  "  J  evens' s  Elementary 
Lessons,"  is  so  simple  that  any  youth  of 
fair  intelligence  who  will  come  to  close 
quarters  with  it  should  master  it  with  ease; 
yet  more  than  one  student,  apparently  in 
full  health  and  intelligence,  declared  that 
he  could  make  nothing  of  it,  that  it  was 
too  hard  for  him  altogether.  He  asked 
to  leave  the  course,  to  count  the  first  half 
of  it  toward  his  degree,  and  to  take  up 
something  more  congenial.  These  boys, 
through  the  labor-saving  appliances  of 


26       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

their  schools,  supplemented  by  their 
choice  of  lecture  courses  in  college,  had 
lost,  or  what  is  almost  as  bad,  thought 
they  had  lost,  the  power  of  close  logical 
application.  Worst  of  all,  they  had  lost 
the  stimulus  of  surmounting  difficulties. 
How  were  they  training  themselves  to 
be  "  there  "  ? 

I  constantly  meet  students  who  declare 
that  they  cannot  learn  geometry.  This 
commonly  means  that  they  hate  geome- 
try so  cordially  as  never  to  give  it  their 
close  attention.  There  may  be  some  in- 
telligent persons  who  cannot  learn  geo- 
metry ;  but  the  vast  majority  of  those 
who  think  they  cannot  learn  it,  learn  it 
if  they  have  to. 

"  I  hold  very  strongly,"  says  Cardinal 
Newman,  "  that  the  first  step  in  intellec- 
tual training  is  to  impress  upon  a  boy's 
mind  the  idea  of  science,  method,  order, 
principle,  and  system  ;  of  rule  and  excep- 
tion, of  richness  and  harmony.  This  is 
commonly  and  excellently  done  by  mak- 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS       27 

ing  him  begin  with  Grammar ;  nor  can 
too  great  accuracy,  or  minuteness  and 
subtlety  of  teaching  be  used  towards  him, 
as  his  faculties  expand,  with  this  simple 
purpose.  Hence  it  is  that  critical  scholar- 
ship is  so  important  a  discipline  for  him 
when  he  is  leaving  school  for  the  Uni- 
versity. A  second  science  is  the  Mathe- 
matics :  this  should  follow  Grammar,  still 
with  the  same  object,  viz.,  to  give  him  a 
conception  of  development  and  arrange- 
ment from  and  around  a  common  centre. 
Hence  it  is  that  Chronology  and  Geo- 
graphy are  so  necessary  for  him,  when 
he  reads  History,  which  is  otherwise  lit- 
tle better  than  a  story-book.  Hence,  too, 
Metrical  Composition,  when  he  reads 
Poetry  ;  in  order  to  stimulate  his  powers 
into  action  in  every  practicable  way,  and 
to  prevent  a  merely  passive  reception  of 
images  and  ideas  which  in  that  case  are 
likely  to  pass  out  of  the  mind  as  soon  as 
they  have  entered  it.  Let  him  once  gain 
this  habit  of  method,  of  starting  from 


28       ROUTINE   AND    IDEALS 

fixed  points,  of  making  his  ground  good 
as  he  goes,  of  distinguishing  what  he 
knows  from  what  he  does  not  know,  and 
I  conceive  he  will  be  gradually  initiated 
into  the  largest  and  truest  philosophical 
views,  and  will  feel  nothing  but  impa- 
tience and  disgust  at  the  random  theories 
and  imposing  sophistries  and  dashing 
paradoxes,  which  carry  away  half-formed 
and  superficial  intellects." 

The  child  who  learns  to  do  small  things 
well  when  he  is  small  gets  the  best  train- 
ing for  doing  big  things  well  when  he  is 
big.  He  lifts  the  calf  every  day ;  and 
behold,  he  has  lifted  the  cow  !  Wherever 
you  go,  you  meet,  not  merely  people  who 
scamp  their  work,  but  people  who  do  not 
know  the  difference  between  a  good  job 
and  a  bad  one.  "  My  great  difficulty," 
says  the  master  of  a  large  private  school, 
"is  to  find  teachers  who  know  anything, 
or  who  seem  as  if  they  had  ever  seen 
anybody  that  knew  anything.  They  have 
plenty  of  '  educational  progress '  and 


ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS       29 

*  educational  theory ; '  but  they  don't 
know  anything."  After  all,  why  should 
they  know  anything  ?  They  have  a  good 
deal  of  more  or  less  accurate  information, 
such  as  people  get  who  have  studied  what 
came  easiest  and  seemed  at  the  time  most 
interesting,  and  have  let  the  rest  go. 
Then,  with  a  little  pedagogy  superadded, 
they  have  been  turned  loose  to  hand 
down  their  principles  to  others.  "  The 
Austrian  ballet"  [Australian  ballot],  a 
New  York  schoolgirl  wrote  in  an  exam- 
ination book,  "  was  introduced  into  this 
country  by  Cleveland  to  corrupt  the  peo- 
ple and  keep  it  secret."  The  state  of  mind 
evinced  by  this  sentence  has  been  too 
common  in  school  children  under  any 
system  of  learning ;  but  I  believe  we  do 
less  to  clear  it  now  than  when  we  paid 
more  attention  to  those  fundamental 
principles  which  tend  to  promote  accu- 
racy in  thought  and  in  expression. 

I  have  said  elsewhere  —  and  I  believe 
it  with  all  my  might  —  that  one  reason 


30       ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

for  the  hold  of  athletic  sport  on  our 
schools  and  colleges  is  its  awakening  in 
many  boys  their  first,  or  almost  their 
first,  ambition  to  do  something  as  well 
as  it  can  be  done,  and  the  recognition  of 
severe  routine  as  a  means  to  that  end. 
In  football  they  are  judged  by  an  in- 
numerable jury  of  their  peers.  Failure 
is  public  disgrace ;  success,  if  decently 
bought,  is  glory.  "  Jack,"  said  a  great 
football  player  to  a  shiftless  student 
whom  he  was  trying  to  look  after  mor- 
ally, "  did  you  ever  do  anything  as  well 
as  you  could  ?  "  "  No,  Tom,"  said  the 
other,  "  I  don't  believe  I  ever  did."  The 
amateur  athlete  is  held  up  to  his  best 
by  the  immediate,  certain,  and  wide- 
spread fame  of  good  playing,  and  the 
equally  prompt  and  notorious  shame  of 
bad  playing.  He  is  held  up,  further,  by 
the  conviction  that  what  he  is  doing  is 
for  his  college  or  for  his  school.  Never 
again,  unless  he  holds  public  office,  will 
such  a  searchlight  be  turned  on  him  ; 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       31 

and  never  again  will  so  many  persons 
see  what  he  does  or  fails  to  do.  As  a  re- 
sult, a  thoroughly  trained  football  player, 
meeting  the  supreme  test,  may  find  him- 
self lifted  up  by  the  inspiration  of  the 
moment,  of  the  crowd,  of  the  cheering, 
and  of  college  patriotism,  so  that  —  as 
some  one  has  put  it — he  plays  better 
than  he  knows  how.  In  a  few  instances 
every  man  in  a  team  plays  better  than 
he  knows  how. 

Older  people  can  hardly  appreciate 
the  stimulus  to  every  power  of  mind  and 
body  in  a  great  athletic  contest.  Here 
is  work  in  which  youth  itself  is  an  ad- 
vantage, in  which  the  highest  honor 
may  be  won  by  a  young  man  who  has 
missed  all  earlier  opportunities  for  doing 
anything  as  well  as  he  knew  how  ;  here 
is  a  fresh  chance  to  show  of  what  stuff 
—  mental  and  physical  —  he  is  made, 
and  a  cause  that  appeals  to  youth  so 
strongly  as  to  make  obstacles  springs  of 
courage.  Here  is  something  that  rouses 


32       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

a  young  man's  powers  as  the  elective 
system  in  study  is  designed  to  do,  yet 
does  not  require  that  basis  of  intellectual 
accuracy  which  is  essential  to  success  in 
study.  Here,  also,  is  something  in  which 
a  young  man  who  can  succeed  knows 
that  success  may  mean  an  opening  for 
the  work  of  his  life.  Thousands  of  men 
actually  see  his  success  with  their  own 
eyes  ;  thousands  more  hear  of  it.  If  on 
graduation  he  applies  for  work,  he  is 
not  the  unknown  quantity  that  a  young 
graduate  usually  is.  He  has  already 
been  tried  in  times  of  stress  and  found 
not  wanting.  If,  as  sometimes  happens, 
he  has  shown,  not  merely  that  he  is  al- 
ways to  be  counted  on,  but  that  in  the 
thick  of  things  he  is  inspired  and  inspir- 
ing, he  has  marked  himself  as  a  leader 
of  men.  Besides,  no  man  can  thoroughly 
succeed  in  football  who  plays  for  himself 
alone.  There  are  few  more  searching 
tests  of  men's  motives  and  spirit.  This  is 
why  class  officers  chosen  from  football 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       33 

players  are  almost  invariably  good  men. 
On  the  gridiron  field  their  classmates 
learn  who  have  self-control,  courage,  en- 
durance, minds  quick  in  emergencies, 
devotion  to  class  and  college,  and  who 
play  to  the  grand  stand,  and  unless  they 
can  be  spectacular  are  of  no  use. 

I  dwell  on  football  because  its  hold  on 
a  college  is  often  misunderstood  by  per- 
sons who  think  of  it  merely  as  a  brutal, 
tricky,  and  sadly  exaggerated  pastime, 
and  not,  in  spite  of  its  evils,  as  a  test  of 
generalship,  physical  and  moral  prow- 
ess, quickness  of  body  and  mind ;  and 
because  it  is  a  good  illustration  of  a  vis- 
ible and  practical  purpose  (crossing  the 
enemy's  goal  line)  fired  by  an  ideal  (the 
honor  and  glory  of  a  college).  The  full 
strength  of  college  feeling  does  not  come 
to  a  man  until  years  after  his  gradua- 
tion ;  but  he  knows  something  of  it  when 
he  "  lines  up  "  beside  his  old  school  en- 
emy against  an  old  school  friend,  who, 
at  the  parting  of  the  ways,  has  chosen 


34       ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

another  Alma  Mater.  As  years  go  by, 
his  love  of  college  becomes  second  only 
to  his  love  of  country.  The  college  be- 
comes more  and  more  a  human  being, 
for  whom  it  is  an  honor  to  work,  to  live, 
and  to  die.  Indeed,  every  man  who  has 
once  taken  her  name  is  in  some  sense 
bound  to  work,  to  live,  and  to  die  for 
her.  In  business,  in  politics,  in  religion, 
in  everything,  it  is  she  who  cheers  him, 
as  he  struggles  to  hold  his  standard 
high.  Much  modern  teaching  dwells  on 
the  development  of  self ;  yet  he  who  de- 
votes himself  to  the  rounding  out  of  his 
own  powers  may  be  good  for  nothing, 
whereas  he  who  devotes  himself  to  what 
he  loves  better  than  himself,  and  thus 
abandons  much  that  looks  good  for  him 
because  he  must  do  something  else  with 
his  whole  heart,  —  must  do  it  often  in  a 
romantic  and  what  may  seem  a  reckless 
loyalty,  —  such  a  man  achieves  a  power 
beyond  the  reach  of  the  professional  self- 
developer.  Education  is  not  in  a  high 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       35 

sense  practical  unless  it  has  an  ideal  in 
it  and  round  about  it.  I  know  the  com- 
mon talk  that  colleges  unfit  their  stu- 
dents for  those  daily  duties  which  might 
chafe  a  mind  that  has  tasted  intellectual 
joy.  No  college  can  make  everybody 
unselfish  and  wise ;  yet  among  human 
powers  for  unselfishness  and  wisdom  I 
know  none  like  that  of  a  healthy  college. 
If  by  a  practical  life  we  mean  such  a 
life  of  service  as  is  not  merely  endured 
but  enjoyed,  lived  with  enthusiasm,  then 
surely  the  most  unpractical  people  in  the 
world  are  the  men  and  women  who  put 
away  their  ideals  as  childish  things. 

"  The  light  of  a  whole  life  dies 
When  love  is  done," 

a  poet  says ;  and  though  he  means  the 
love  between  man  and  woman,  his  verse 
would  be  more  deeply  true  if  "love" 
might  take  on  the  wider  meaning  of 
that  faith  and  energy  and  courage  and 
enthusiasm  which  light  the  dim  and  tor- 
tuous way.  With  this,  no  life  while  sense 


36       ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS 

remains  can  be  crushed  by  drudgery  or 
woe.  Without  it,  a  life  of  drudgery  is  a 
life  of  Egyptian  darkness.  "  Where  there 
is  no  vision  the  people  perish." 

The  college  helps  her  sons  and  daugh- 
ters to  keep  alive  the  vision.  She  dif- 
fuses about  them  what  Mr.  Justice 
Holmes  has  called  "  an  aroma  of  high 
feeling,  not  to  be  found  or  lost  in  science 
or  Greek,  —  not  to  be  fixed,  yet  all-per- 
vading." She  shows,  in  steady  bright- 
ness to  the  best,  in  flashing  glimpses  to 
the  worst,  the  vision  without  which  there 
is  no  life.  She  teaches  her  children  not 
to  shun  drudgery  but  to  do  the  work, 
and  in  doing  it  to  know  its  higher  end. 
The  question  whether  a  thing  is  ever- 
lasting truth  or  commonplace  is  often 
a  question  whether  it  has  or  has  not  a 
light  in  it.  Homer,  even  when  he  tells 
us  how  Telemachus  put  on  his  clothes, 
is  not  commonplace.  "  I  suppose,"  says 
Ruskin,  "  the  passage  in  the  Iliad  which 
on  the  whole  has  excited  most  admira- 


ROUTINE  AND   IDEALS       37 

tion  is  that  which  describes  a  wife's  sor- 
row at  parting  from  her  husband,  and  a 
child's  fright  at  its  father's  helmet."  It 
is  education  that  helps  us  see,  as  Homer 
saw,  the  high  meaning  of  the  common- 
place in  every  part  of  life,  the  beauty 
whereby  the  drudgery  of  daily  life  be- 
comes transfigured.  It  is  education  that 
teaches  us  not  to  measure  the  best  things 
in  the  world  by  money.  It  is  educated 
men  and  women,  beyond  all  others,  who 
throw  into  their  work  that  eager  sacri- 
fice of  love  for  which  no  money  can  pay, 
and  to  which,  when  work  cries  out  to 
be  done,  no  task  is  too  forbidding,  no 
hours  are  too  long.  The  practical  life  is 
the  life  of  steady,  persistent,  intelligent, 
courageous  work,  widening  its  horizon 
as  the  worker  grows  in  knowledge,  and, 
by  doing  well  what  lies  before  him,  fits 
himself  for  harder  and  higher  tasks.  But 
the  practical  life  of  educated  men  and 
women  is,  or  should  be,  even  more  than 
this.  It  makes,  or  should  make,  every 


38       ROUTINE   AND   IDEALS 

task  the  expression  of  an  enlightened 
spirit.  There  were  in  the  nineteenth 
century  few  lives  more  practical  than 
those  of  the  "  heroic  boys  "  who,  in  the 
exquisite  words  of  their  old  comrade, 
"  gave  freely  and  eagerly  all  that  they 
had  or  hoped  for  to  their  country  and 
to  their  fellow-men  in  the  hour  of  great 
need."  In  such  a  practical  life  as  every 
man  or  woman  ought  to  lead,  such  a 
practical  life  as  educated  men  and  wo- 
men are  bound  to  lead  or  be  false  to 
their  trust,  it  is  the  vision  that  abides 
and  commands. 


HARVARD    AND    THE 
INDIVIDUAL 


HARVARD    AND    THE 
INDIVIDUAL 

FOR  such  intercollegiate  discussion  as 
takes  the  form  of  "  symposia  "  in  Sunday 
papers,  the  relative  merit  of  large  and 
small  colleges  is  a  never-failing  topic; 
and  in  this  discussion  some  officers  of 
the  smaller  colleges  maintain  that  a  col- 
lege is  the  better  for  being  small.  With- 
out inquiring  whether  these  gentlemen 
would  reject  opportunities  of  growth  for 
their  own  colleges,  whether  the  system 
of  admission  by  certificate  is  not  chiefly 
a  bid  for  students,  and  whether  the  very 
pleas  for  the  small  college  are  not  de- 
signed to  make  it  larger,  I  pass  at  once 
to  the  strongest  argument  of  the  small 
college  —  iihe  argument  that  in  it  every- 
body knows  everybody  else,  and  that 


42  HARVARD   AND 

consequently,  while  the  whole  commu- 
nity may  move  as  one  man,  the  individ- 
ual is  never  ignored.  In  a  large  college, 
these  gentlemen  contend,  concerted  ac- 
tion is  impossible ;  and  the  individual 
with  no  strong  social  claim  is  lost  in  the 
crowd.  Near  a  whole  city  full,  home  he 
has  none.  If  he  is  poor,  he  may  starve ; 
if  he  is  morbid,  he  may  go  mad ;  if  he 
is  sick,  he  may  die  —  and  no  one  of  his 
fellows  knows  till  all  is  over.  If  he  is 
eccentric,  he  may  be  "queered,"  as  it  is 
called,  growing  queerer  and  queerer  un- 
til an  eccentricity  which  might  be  modi- 
fied into  effective  individuality  has  be- 
come a  hopeless  inability  to  get  on  with 
men.  In  a  small  college  the  student  who 
would  be  a  recluse  is  literally  dragged 
out  of  his  den  to  see  football — or  even 
to  play  it  —  and  is  humanized  thereby. 
At  a  large  college  nobody  need  know 
or  care  whether  any  one  sees  a  game  of 
football  or  not.  There  are  enough  with- 
out him.  If  he  chooses  to  "  flock  by 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  43 

himself,"  he  may  do  so  till  he  is  at  cross 
purposes  with  his  own  youth  and  with 
every  natural  manifestation  of  youth  in 
others.  Yet  the  spirit  that  brings  all  the 
students  of  a  college  together  for  a  com- 
mon purpose,  the  undivided  enthusiasm 
of  a  whole  college,  is  one  of  the  precious 
experiences  of  education  ;  for  even  when 
to  middle-aged  people  the  cause  seems 
trivial,  the  spirit  is  patriotism,  the  same 
patriotism  that  in  a  national  crisis 
"  Shall  nerve  heroic  boys 
To  hazard  all  in  Freedom's  fight." 

That  even  a  large  college  may  be 
roused  as  one  man  is  obvious  to  any- 
body who  has  heard  (I  use  the  word  ad- 
visedly) a  game  of  baseball  at  Princeton, 
or  who  has  known  athletics  at  Yale,  or 
who  knew  Harvard  in  the  football  sea- 
son of  1901.  Princeton,  situated  in  a 
small  town  on  an  isolated  hill,  is  a  cen- 
tre to  itself.  Yale  lived  long  in  and 
about  a  crowded  campus,  and  is  so  far 
from  a  great  city  that  even  on  Saturdays 


44  HARVARD   AND 

and  Sundays  the  students  naturally  stay 
at  the  college.  At  Yale,  moreover,  as  at 
Princeton,  the  elective  system  was  for 
many  years  applied  so  sparingly  that 
the  students  felt  the  sympathy  which 
comes  of  common  tasks;  and  even  if 
now  and  then  this  union,  like  some 
others,  was  a  union  for  the  avoidance  of 
labor,  it  could  not  but  prove  a  strong 
bond.  Harvard,  on  the  contrary,  seems 
at  first  sight  to  have  every  requisite  for 
disintegration :  she  lives  close  to  a  large 
city,  full  of  social  distractions;  she  has 
hundreds  of  students  from  Boston  and 
the  suburbs  who  may  go  and  come 
every  day ;  her  recitation  halls,  her  labo- 
ratories, and  even  her  dormitories  are 
often  far  apart.  Moreover  her  elective 
system  is  so  free  that  even  at  the  outset 
it  breaks  up  the  classes ;  and  not  only 
Jones  and  Smith,  but  Jones  and  John- 
son, whose  alphabetical  destiny  would 
seem  to  unite  them,  may  go  through 
four  years  without  knowing  each  other 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  45 

by  sight  or  even  being  in  the  same  lec- 
ture room  at  the  same  time.  In  such  a 
university,  it  is  urged,  all  common  feel- 
ing must  be  factitious  —  "  pumped,"  like 
that  organized  cheering  when  nobody  is 
cheerful,  but  everybody  is  trying  to 
"support"  his  team  and  "rattle"  the 
other  one.  In  organized  cheering,  it  is 
urged,  and  in  that  only,  Jones  and  John- 
son have  a  common  emotional  experi- 
ence, but  they  have  it  anonymously. 

A  story  told  by  Professor  Palmer  and 
afterward  printed  by  Mr.  E.  S.  Martin 
reveals  the  divided  interests  of  Harvard. 
On  the  evening  of  a  mass  meeting  in 
Massachusetts  Hall  for  the  discussion 
of  some  point  in  the  athletic  relations 
between  Harvard  and  Yale,  Professor 
Palmer  went  to  Sever  Hall,  where  Mr. 
David  A.  Wells  was  to  lecture  on  bank- 
ing ;  and  as  he  went  he  was  troubled  by 
the  thought  that  "  those  boys  "  would  all 
be  in  Massachusetts  Hall,  and  that  Mr. 
Wells  would  have  no  audience.  Arriving 


46  HARVARD   AND 

at  the  lecture  hall,  which  seats  over  four 
hundred  persons,  he  found  standing-room 
only  ;  and  it  was  not  Cambridge  women 
that  filled  the  seats  —  it  was  Harvard 
students.  After  the  lecture,  remember- 
ing that  there  should  be  that  evening 
a  meeting  of  the  Classical  Club,  he  went 
to  the  top  of  Stoughton  Hall  to  find  there 
between  twenty  and  thirty  men,  who, 
oblivious  alike  of  banking  and  of  Yale, 
had  spent  the  evening  in  a  discussion  of 
Homeric  philology.  "Harvard  indiffer- 
ence," says  one  critic  ;  "  Harvard  Uni- 
versity," says  another.  Much  of  the 
strength  of  Harvard  lies  in  her  diversity 
of  interests.  Side  by  side  with  the  boys 
whose  passion  is  football  are  the  men 
whose  passion  is  mathematics  or  philo- 
sophy, who  care  nothing  for  intercolle- 
giate politics  and  less  than  nothing  for 
intercollegiate  athletics  ;  and  such  is  the 
freedom  of  Harvard  that  these  men  are 
suffered  to  follow  their  own  bent,  and 
are  not  forced  into  a  life  with  which  they 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  47 

have  no  sympathy.  To  one  who  has  lived 
in  Harvard  College  it  is  the  college  of  all 
colleges  for  the  recognition  of  individual 
needs  and  individual  rights  ;  of  the  in- 
evitable and  delightful  variety  in  talent 
and  temperament,  and  even  in  enthu- 
siasm. When  all  the  people  in  one  place 
are  interested  in  one  thing,  it  may  be 
inspiration,  and  it  may  be  provinciality. 
When  everybody  in  a  university  shouts 
at  every  ball  game,  athletics  prosper,  but 
culture  pines.  Where  Greek  and  the 
chapel  are  elective,  baseball  should  not 
be  prescribed  ;  and  where  baseball  is  not 
prescribed,  there  are  sure  to  be  individ- 
uals who  cannot  always  occupy  either 
the  diamond  or  the  bleachers. 

"We  grant,"  it  may  be  said,  "  that  Har- 
vard allows  and  encourages  a  man  to  lead 
an  independent  intellectual  life,  to  get  all 
the  Greek  he  wants,  and  all  the  chemis- 
try he  wants  —  and  no  more ;  but  what 
of  human  fellowship,  the  real  and  great 
and  permanent  blessing  of  college  life  ?  " 


48  HARVARD   AND 

The  answer  of  any  one  who  knows  the 
College  is  this :  if  a  man  is  interested  in 
anything  outside  of  himself,  he  will  get 
human  fellowship  in  Cambridge ;  if  he 
is  not,  he  will  not  get  it  anywhere.  The 
best  friendships,  as  divers  wise  men  have 
told  us,  are  based  on  common  interest  in 
work.  Editors  of  a  college  paper,  debat- 
ers in  a  college  team,  students  working 
side  by  side  in  a  laboratory — or  even  in 
athletics,  now  that  athletics  have  ceased 
to  be  play  —  these  men,  and  not  the  fel- 
low poker-players,  are  laying  the  founda- 
tion of  permanent  friendship.  Harvard 
College  contains  hundreds  of  groups  of 
men  who  come  together  for  work  which 
they  do  for  the  love  of  it ;  and  in  some 
one  of  these  an  earnest  man  is  sure  to 
find  or  make  his  friends.  Is  it  better  to 
know  everybody  in  a  class  of  fifty  or  fifty 
in  a  class  of  five  hundred  ?  Which  offers 
the  more  reasonable  and  promising  basis 
for  the  friendship  of  a  life  ?  Is  there  not, 
after  all,  some  danger  when  even  affini- 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  49 

ties  are,  as  it  were,  prescribed  and  pro- 
vincial—  some  danger  in  that  extem- 
pore intimacy,  that  almost  instantaneous 
swearing  of  eternal  friendship,  which  a 
small  community  may  demand? 

"  But  what  of  the  relation  between  stu- 
dent and  instructor  ?  "  In  a  small  college 
the  Faculty  know,  or  think  they  know, 
every  student.  Between  the  large  college 
and  the  small  there  is  a  real  difference  in 
the  relation  of  the  instructors  as  a  whole 
toward  the  students  as  individuals,  and 
in  the  relation  of  the  students  as  a  whole 
toward  the  instructors  as  individuals.  In 
Harvard  University  are  over  three  hun- 
dred professors,  instructors,  and  assist- 
ants under  the  Faculty  of  Arts  and  Sci- 
ences alone,  of  whom  more  than  a  third 
are  members  of  that  Faculty  appointed 
either  for  a  term  of  years  or  without 
limit  of  time.  No  teacher  knows  by  sight 
every  other  teacher ;  still  less  does  any 
teacher  know  every  student.  Yet  many 
teachers  know  more  students  than  they 


50  HARVARD   AND 

would  or  could  know  in  a  small  college ; 
and  every  student  is  known  by  several 
teachers  besides  his  Freshman  "  adviser." 
Even  the  large  lecture  courses  are  so 
combined  with  laboratory  work  or  con- 
ferences or  excursions  that  the  students 
in  them  are  brought  into  contact  with 
the  younger  teachers  if  not  with  the  older 
ones.  There  is,  I  believe,  no  college  in 
which  the  relation  between  instructor 
and  pupil  is  more  delightful.  The  ma- 
turer  students  are  frequently  consulted 
in  matters  of  general  importance  and 
frequently  called  upon  to  help  other  stu- 
dents who  need  the  strength  that  comes 
from  strong  friends.  Many  instructors 
invite  students  to  their  houses,  or  keep 
certain  hours  clear,  as  the  University 
preachers  do,  for  any  and  all  students. 
Every  Christmas  Eve  Professor  Norton 
opens  his  fine  old  house  at  Shady  Hill 
to  all  members  of  the  University  who  are 
away  from  home.  Some  young  men,  it  is 
said,  stay  away  from  home  a  day  longer 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  51 

to  meet  Professor  Norton  thus ;  and  their 
host  would  forgive  them  if  he  could  know 
the  charm  of  an  evening  with  him. 

Within  a  few  years  the  wives  of  cer- 
tain University  officers  have  instituted 
a  series  of  afternoon  teas  on  Fridays 
between  Thanksgiving  and  the  first  of 
March,  and  have  invited  all  members 
of  the  University.  The  teas,  on  which 
students  at  first  looked  sceptically  if  not 
scornfully,  are  now  fairly  established. 
They  have  done  much  in  giving  new- 
comers what  they  sadly  need  —  the  so- 
ciety of  refined  women  —  and  in  giving 
all  students  opportunities  of  meeting 
persons  whom  it  is  a  privilege  to  know. 
The  room  used  for  the  teas  is  the  large 
parlor  of  Phillips  Brooks  House ;  the  rug 
in  the  centre  was  Bishop  Brooks' s  own ; 
and  the  bust  in  the  adjoining  hall,  with 
the  tablet  beside  it,  leads  men's  thoughts 
to  him  for  whom  the  house  was  named, 
and  in  whose  honor  it  was  dedicated  to 
hospitality  as  well  as  to  piety. 


52  HARVARD   AND 

The  homesick  Freshman  from  a  dis- 
tant State  finds  at  Cambridge  a  better 
welcome  than  he  expects,  though  no 
kindness  can  at  once  and  forever  anni- 
hilate homesickness.  Some  years  ago  a 
well-known  professor,  walking  through 
the  College  Yard  at  the  beginning  of 
the  autumn  term,  met  a  young  man 
whose  aspect  prompted  him  to  say  :  "Are 
you  looking  for  anybody?"  The  young 
man  answered  :  "  I  don't  know  anybody 
this  side  of  the  Rocky  Mountains."  Of 
what  immediately  followed  I  know  no- 
thing, but  can  guess  much.  Of  one 
thing  I  am  sure, —  the  young  man  is 
to-day  a  loyal  graduate  of  Harvard 
College.  Nowadays  the  newly  arrived 
student  finds  waiting  for  him,  even  be- 
fore he  meets  his  "  adviser,"  a  committee 
of  instructors  and  undergraduates  whose 
business  and  whose  pleasure  it  is  to  help 
him  adjust  himself  to  his  new  surround- 
ings. Nor  has  he  been  long  at  the  Uni- 
versity before  he  is  invited  to  the  room 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  53 

of  a  Junior  or  a  Senior,  to  meet  there  a 
few  members  of  his  own  class,  as  well  as 
members  of  other  classes.  There  he  and 
his  classmates  are  entertained  by  the 
older  men,  who  often  give  them  serious 
and  sensible  advice ;  and  there  they  are 
made  to  feel  that  they  are  "  taken  into 
the  team."  "Entertained,"  I  said,  —  not 
hazed,  as  of  old ;  and  though  the  decline 
and  fall  of  hazing  may  cut  off  Fresh- 
men from  the  instantaneous  friendships 
of  cooperative  self-defence,  few  will  re- 
gard it  as  a  mark  of  degeneration.  To  at 
least  one  of  these  entertainments  every 
Freshman  is  invited;  for  the  large  com- 
mittee of  Seniors  and  Juniors  in  charge 
assigns  each  Freshman  to  some  one  man. 
Freshmen  are  invited,  also,  by  their  class 
president  to  social  evening  meetings,  for 
which  purpose,  since  scarcely  any  room 
can  hold  them  all,  the  class  is  sometimes 
divided  into  squads  of  fifty  or  sixty. 
Again,  in  the  new  Harvard  Union, 
which,  like  so  much  else,  the  University 


54  HARVARD   AND 

owes  to  Mr.  Henry  L.  Higginson,  the 
newcomer  finds  countless  opportunities 
of  scraping  acquaintance  with  his  fel- 
lows. 

Probably  the  sick  student  is  better  and 
more  promptly  cared  for  at  Harvard 
than  at  any  other  university  in  the  world. 
Here,  as  elsewhere,  a  taciturn  and  cour- 
ageous person  may  bear  much  pain  and 
disease  without  revealing  his  bodily 
state  to  a  physician ;  but  nowhere  is  such 
conduct  less  necessary  and  less  excusa- 
ble. Every  student  not  well  enough  to 
attend  College  exercises  need  only  send 
word  to  the  Medical  Visitor,  who  will 
come  at  once  to  his  room  and  tell  him 
what  to  do.  If  the  case  is  simple,  the 
Medical  Visitor  gives  advice  and,  it  may 
be,  a  prescription ;  if  it  requires  pro- 
longed medical  attendance,  he  sends  for 
any  physician  that  the  student  may 
name.  He  himself  keeps  fixed  office 
hours  in  the  College  Yard  for  consulta- 
tion with  such  students  as  need  him  ;  nor 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  55 

does  he  receive  pay  for  any  part  of  his 
work  as  Medical  Visitor  beyond  his  sal- 
ary from  the  University.  The  prompt- 
ness and  the  devotion  of  this  officer 
reduce  to  a  minimum  the  danger  of  con- 
tagion from  epidemics.  For  the  care  of 
the  sick,  the  Stillman  Infirmary  has  al- 
ready a  nearly  perfect  equipment;  and 
the  new  ward  for  contagious  diseases 
will  make  the  Infirmary  complete. 

As  to  moral  aid  for  the  individual  stu- 
dents, no  one  who  is  not  inside  of  Har- 
vard life  can  begin  to  know  how  many 
young  fellows  are  aiding  the  weaker 
brethren  to  lead  clean,  sober,  and  hon- 
est lives ;  how  much  responsibility  of 
all  sorts  the  best  students  will  take, 
not  merely  for  their  personal  friends  but 
for  anybody  that  they  can  help.  Some 
years  ago  a  young  man  of  strange  and 
forbidding  character  was  seen  running 
round  and  round  on  a  Cambridge  side- 
walk, imagining  that  he  was  Adam 
flying  from  temptation  ;  and  though  ob- 


56  HARVARD   AND 

viously  insane  he  was  put  into  the  sta- 
tion-house. The  case  was  made  known 
to  a  student  who  as  a  child  had  attended 
the  same  school.  He  had  never  known 
the  sick  man  much,  and  had  never  known 
good  of  him ;  yet  he  got  his  release 
from  the  station-house,  promising  to  be 
responsible  for  him  through  the  night. 
With  the  aid  of  a  fellow  student  he  took 
into  his  own  rooms  the  insane  man,  and 
gave  him  the  bedroom.  He  himself  with 
his  friend  sat  up  all  night  in  the  adjoin- 
ing study.  Into  this  study  the  madman 
would  issue  from  time  to  time,  making 
night  hideous  to  the  two  watchers ;  but 
they  did  not  lose  patience.  In  the  morn- 
ing the  student  in  charge  secured  a  phy- 
sician, assumed  the  responsibility  of  a 
guardian,  drove  with  the  sick  man  to 
the  nearest  asylum,  advanced  money  (of 
which  he  was  notoriously  short)  for  ne- 
cessary expenses,  and  then,  exhausted, 
hastened  to  New  York  to  meet  his  fel- 
low members  of  the  Hasty  Pudding  Club 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  57 

(who  had  started,  I  believe,  the  night 
before)  and  appeared  as  a  smiling  star 
in  the  performance  for  which  he  had 
been  so  strangely  prepared.  No  casual 
observer  would  have  dreamed  that  in 
this  apparently  thoughtless  person  were 
the  quick  courage  and  devotion  which 
made  inevitable  the  acceptance  of  a 
revolting  service  for  a  youth  who  was 
almost  an  outcast. 

The  University  is  a  little  world  with 
all  the  varied  enthusiasms  of  athletic,  in- 
tellectual, social,  and  moral  life ;  and  in 
spite  of  the  temptation  here  as  in  other 
worlds,  little  or  big,  for  men  to  break 
up  into  small  and  exclusive  groups,  the 
number  of  students  who  have  with  their 
fellows  an  acquaintance  wide  and  varied 
is  exceedingly  large.  Our  wiser  students 
recognize  the  truth  of  the  late  Lord 
Dundreary's  famous  proverb,  "  Birds  of 
a  feather  gather  no  moss,"  and  act  ac- 
cordingly. Moreover  there  are  few  com- 
munities, if  any,  in  which  a  man  may 


58  HARVARD   AND 

stand  more  firmly  on  what  he  himself  is 
and  does,  trusting  to  be  judged  thereby. 
I  doubt  whether  any  student  within  my 
memory  was  ever  more  warmly  admired 
and  loved  than  Marshall  Newell,  a  farmer 
boy.  He  was,  it  is  true,  an  athlete,  "  an 
athlete  sturdy,  alert,  and  brave."  Ath- 
letics made  him  widely  known ;  what 
made  him  widely  loved  was  not  athletics 
but  the  strong,  healthy,  simple,  and  fear- 
less heart  which  revealed  itself  in  his 
athletics  as  in  everything  else  about 
him  ;  and  when  he  died  one  of  the  social 
leaders  of  his  college  days  said  sincerely 
that  it  was  worth  while  to  spend  four 
years  in  Harvard  College,  merely  to  have 
known  such  a  man  as  he. 

Not  many  years  ago  a  big  country 
boy  named  Adelbert  Shaw  entered  Har- 
vard College  as  a  special  student.  He 
had  been  fitting  himself  for  Wesleyan 
University,  and  had  changed  his  plans 
so  suddenly  that  he  could  not  take  all 
the  Harvard  examinations  for  regular 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  59 

standing.  On  his  arrival  he  knew  but 
one  or  two  persons  in  the  University. 
He  had  little  capital  besides  a  strong 
body  and  mind,  an  unmistakable  good 
nature,  a  big  earnestness,  and  an  unu- 
sual aptitude  for  turning  from  one  kind 
of  work  to  another  with  equal  devotion 
to  each  and  no  waste  of  power  in  the 
transition.  On  the  football  field  he  made 
people  laugh  by  his  awkwardness  and 
by  the  beaming  good  humor  with  which 
he  hurled  himself  into  the  scrimmage ; 
in  the  classroom  he  was  as  earnest  as 
on  the  ball  field ;  in  his  own  room,  not- 
withstanding his  sudden  and  universal 
popularity,  he  worked  hard,  and  in  study 
hours  kept  his  door  closed  to  all  but  the 
few  that  he  knew  best.  He  was  not  a 
great  athlete,  though  he  might  have  be- 
come one.  He  played  in  the  Freshman 
football  team,  was  a  substitute  in  the 
University  football  squad,  and  later  ap- 
peared as  a  candidate  for  the  University 
crew.  In  the  spring  of  his  first  year  at 


60  HARVARD   AND 

Cambridge,  he  was  thrown  out  of  a  sin- 
gle shell  and  was  drowned.  His  body 
was  sent  home ;  but  after  it  had  gone, 
a  service  was  held  in  Appleton  Chapel, 
which  contained  that  day  more  students 
than  I  have  ever  seen  in  it  before  or 
since.  In  Holden  Chapel  the  athletes 
had  a  service  of  their  own ;  and  the  stu- 
dent who  took  charge  of  it  could  scarcely 
speak.  Shaw  was  a  religious  man,  ear- 
nest in  religion  as  in  all  things ;  yet  he 
was  never  praised  more  highly  than  by 
a  student  who  was  known  as  a  cynic. 
In  a  few  months  this  unknown  coun- 
try boy  had  won  the  respect  and  the 
affection  of  the  College  that  some  still 
call  indifferent,  undemocratic,  an  aristo- 
cracy of  Boston  society  and  New  York 
wealth. 

If  a  youth  makes  no  friends  in  Cam- 
bridge, it  is  stupendously  his  own  fault. 
I  do  not  say  that  it  is  impossible  for 
a  Harvard  student  to  go  off  by  him- 
self, dig  a  hole,  lie  down  in  it,  and  stay 


THE   INDIVIDUAL  61 

there  —  as  he  might  not  be  able  to  do  at 
a  small  college ;  I  do  say  that  those  who 
affirm  Harvard  to  be  undemocratic  or 
to  value  men  for  their  money  are  either 
misinformed  or  defamatory.  I  could 
name  plenty  of  men  whom  heaps  of 
money  did  not  save  from  social  fail- 
ure in  Harvard  College ;  and  even  more 
whom  narrow  means  and  want  of  fam- 
ily connection  did  not  cut  off  from  al- 
most universal  popularity.  Students  at 
Harvard,  like  students  elsewhere  —  like 
all  men,  young  or  old  —  may  misjudge 
their  fellows,  and,  misjudging  them,  may 
use  them  cruelly.  Yet  even  in  such  cases 
most  of  the  blame  belongs  commonly  to 
the  misjudged  man.  The  student  who 
bears  himself  well  and  does  something  for 
his  class  or  his  College  is  sure  eventually 
to  succeed.  In  the  Freshman  year  a  few 
prizes  may  be  given  to  attractive  loaf- 
ers ;  but  in  the  long  run  the  Harvard 
public  insists  on  some  form  of  achieve- 
ment. No  individual  who  does  anything 


62  HARVARD 

worth  doing,  and  does  it  with  all  his 
might,  need  be  lost  in  the  crowd  at  Har- 
vard ;  and,  taken  for  all  in  all,  Harvard 
is  the  best  place  I  know  for  the  indi- 
vidual youth. 


ADDRESS   TO   THE    SCHOOL 
CHILDREN   OF  CONCORD 


ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 
CHILDREN  OF  CONCORD,  MAS- 
SACHUSETTS, ON  THE  ONE 
HUNDREDTH  ANNIVERSARY 
OF  THE  BIRTH  OF  EMERSON, 
MAY  25,  1903. 

Now  and  then  we  meet  a  man  who  seems 
to  live  high  above  the  little  things  that 
vex  our  lives,  and  who  makes  us  forget 
them.  He  may  speak  or  he  may  be  si- 
lent ;  it  is  enough  that  he  lives  and  that 
we  are  with  him.  When  we  face  him,  we 
feel  somewhat  as  we  feel  when  we  first 
see  the  ocean,  or  Niagara,  or  the  Alps, 
or  Athens,  or  when  we  first  read  the 
greatest  poetry.  Nothing,  indeed,  is  more 
like  great  poetry  than  the  soul  of  a  great 
man  ;  and  when  the  great  man  is  good, 
when  he  loves  everything  that  is  beauti- 
ful and  true  and  makes  his  life  like  what 


66    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

he  loves,  his  face  becomes  transfigured, 
or,  as  an  old  poet  used  to  say,  "  through- 
shine  ; "  for  the  soul  within  him  is  the 
light  of  the  world. 

Such  a  great  man  was  Emerson.  He 
was  much  beside  :  he  was  a  philosopher. 
Sometimes  a  philosopher  is  a  man  who 
disbelieves  everything  worth  believing, 
and  spends  a  great  deal  of  strength  in 
making  simple  things  hard ;  but  Emer- 
son was  a  philosopher  in  the  best  sense 
of  the  word,  —  a  lover  of  wisdom  and  of 
truth.  He  was  also  a  poet ;  not  a  poet 
like  Homer  who  sang,  but  a  poet  like 
that  Greek  philosopher,  Plato,  who 
thought  deep  and  high,  and  saw  what 
no  one  else  saw,  and  told  what  he  saw 
as  no  one  else  could  tell  it.  This  is  an- 
other way  of  saying  that  Emerson  was 
a  "  seer." 

To  many  of  you  he  may  not  seem  a 
poet,  for  his  verse  is  often  homely  and 
rough.  It  has  lines  and  stanzas  of  noble 
music,  — 


CHILDREN  OF  CONCORD     67 

"  Out  from  the  heart  of  nature  rolled 
The  burdens  of  the  Bible  old." 

"  Still  on  the  seeds  of  all  he  made 

The  rose  of  beauty  burns. 
Through  times  that  wear  and  forms  that  fade 
Immortal  youth  returns  ; " 

but  seldom  many  of  them  in  succession. 

"  Though  love  repine  and  reason  chafe, 

There  came  a  voice  without  reply,  — 
'  'T  is  man's  perdition  to  be  safe, 

When  for  the  truth  he  ought  to  die.' " 

The  first  three  of  these  lines  are  beyond 
the  reach  of  most  poets ;  the  fourth  line 
is  prose. 

"  I  am  born  a  poet,"  he  wrote  to  his 
betrothed ;  "  of  a  low  class  without  doubt, 
yet  a  poet.  That  is  my  nature  and  voca- 
tion. My  singing,  be  sure,  is  very  husky, 
and  is,  for  the  most  part,  in  prose."  "He 
lamented  his  hard  fate,"  says  his  bio- 
grapher, Mr.  Cabot,  "  in  being  only  half 
a  bard  ;  or,  as  he  wrote  to  Carlyle,  '  not  a 
poet,  but  a  lover  of  poetry  and  poets, 
and  merely  serving  as  writer,  etc.,  in 


68    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

this  empty  America  before  the  arrival  of 
the  poets.'  "  He  questioned  whether  to 
print  his  poems,  "  uncertain  always,"  he 
wrote,  "  whether  I  have  one  true  spark 
of  that  fire  which  burns  in  verse ; "  and 
in  a  little  poem,  called  "The  Test,"  he 
says  that  in  some  five  hundred  of  his 
verses 

"  Five  lines  lasted,  sound  and  true." 

When  he  wrote  prose,  he  thought  of  a 
sentence  by  itself,  and  not  of  its  connec- 
tion with  other  sentences  ;  and  when  he 
wrote  verse,  he  thought,  it  would  seem, 
of  the  form  of  each  line,  without  much 
attention  to  the  form  or  the  length  of  its 
neighbors,  or  even  to  its  own  smooth- 
ness, —  he  whose  ear  for  a  prose  sentence 
was  trained  so  delicately. 

Yet  I,  for  one,  would  give  up  any  other 
poetry  of  America  rather  than  Emer- 
son's ;  and  I  am  certain  that  one  secret 
of  his  power  over  men  and  women  was 
his  belief  that  every  human  soul  is  poetry 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     69 

and  a  poet,  and  his  waking  of  men  and 
women  to  that  belief.  He  had  beyond 
other  men  a  poet's  heart ;  and  if,  as  Car- 
lyle  says,  to  see  deeply  is  to  see  music- 
ally, and  poetry  is  musical  thought,  he 
is  a  poet  of  poets. 

"  God  hid  the  whole  world  in  thy  heart," 

says  Emerson.  "  The  poet,"  he  says  else- 
where, "  knows  why  the  plain  or  meadow 
of  space  was  strown  with  these  flowers 
we  call  suns,  and  moons,  and  stars ;  why 
the  great  deep  is  adorned  with  animals, 
with  men  and  gods." 

Nature  he  lived  with ;  and  when  he 
wrote  of  her,  he  wrote  as  one  who  knew 
her  as  his  closest  friend.  "My  book 
should  smell  of  pines,"  he  said. 

"  To  read  the  sense  the  woods  impart 
You  must  bring  the  throbbing  heart." 

"  Sheen  will  tarnish,  honey  cloy, 
And  merry  is  only  a  mask  of  sad, 
But,  sober  on  a  fund  of  joy, 
The  woods  at  heart  are  glad." 


70    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

"  Hast  thou  named  all  the  birds  without  a  gun  ? 
Loved  the  wood-rose  and  left  it  on  its  stalk  ? 

O  be  my  friend,  and  teach  me  to  be  thine." 

"  Thou  "  [the  poet] ,  he  said,  "  shalt 
have  the  whole  land  for  thy  park  and 
manor,  the  sea  for  thy  bath  and  naviga- 
tion, without  tax  and  without  envy ;  the 
woods  and  the  rivers  thou  shalt  own ; 
and  thou  shalt  possess  that  wherein  oth- 
ers are  only  tenants  and  boarders.  Thou 
true  land-lord  !  sea-lord  !  air-lord  !  Wher- 
ever snow  falls,  or  water  flows,  or  birds 
fly,  wherever  day  and  night  meet  in  twi- 
light, wherever  the  blue  heaven  is  hung 
by  clouds  or  sown  with  stars,  wherever 
are  forms  with  transparent  boundaries, 
wherever  are  outlets  into  celestial  space, 
wherever  is  danger  and  awe  and  love, 
there  is  Beauty,  plenteous  as  rain,  shed 
for  thee  ;  and  though  thou  shouldst  walk 
the  world  over,  thou  shalt  not  be  able 
to  find  a  condition  inopportune  or  ig- 
noble." 


CHILDREN   OF  CONCORD     71 

The  poet  is  not  only  a  seer,  he  is  a 
hearer : — 

"  Let  me  go  where'er  I  will 
I  hear  a  sky-born  music  still : 
It  sounds  from  all  things  old, 
It  sounds  from  all  things  young, 
From  all  that 's  fair,  from  all  that 's  foul, 
Peals  out  a  cheerful  song. 
It  is  not  only  in  the  rose, 
It  is  not  only  in  the  bird, 
Not  only  where  the  rainbow  glows, 
Nor  in  the  song  of  woman  heard, 
But  in  the  darkest,  meanest  things 
There  alway,  alway  something  sings. 
'T  is  not  in  the  high  stars  alone, 
Nor  in  the  cups  of  budding  flowers, 
Nor  in  the  red-breast's  mellow  tone, 
Nor  in  the  bow  that  smiles  in  showers, 
But  in  the  mud  and  scum  of  things 
There  alway,  alway  something  sings." 

Yet  it  was  not  cheerfulness  that  made 
Emerson  a  poet ;  and  certainly  it  was  not 
music,  in  the  common  understanding  of 
the  term:  it  was  high  thought,  joined 
with  a  wonderful  gift  —  an  almost  in- 
spired sense  —  of  the  right  word  ;  a  gift 


72    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

not  always  his,  but  his  so  often  that  he 
has  said  more  memorable  things  than 
any  other  American.  You  can  find  no 
higher  simplicity  in  the  fitting  of  word  to 
thought :  — 

"  Though  love  repine  and  reason  chafe, 
There  came  a  voice  without  reply." 

While  I  speak  of  the  poetry  in  him 
and  the  love  of  nature,  let  me  read  what 
he  wrote  to  a  little  girl  of  thirteen  who 
looked  up  to  him  then  and  always  :  — 

MY  DEAR  LUCIA  :  —  I  am  afraid  you 
think  me  very  ungrateful  for  the  good 
letters  which  I  begged  for  and  which 
are  so  long  in  coming  to  me,  or  that  I 
am  malicious  and  mean  to  make  you 
wait  as  long  for  an  answer  ;  but,  to  tell 
you  the  truth,  I  have  had  so  many  "  com- 
position lessons  "  set  me  lately,  that  I  am 
sure  that  no  scholar  of  Mr.  Moore's  has 
had  less  spare  time.  Otherwise  I  should 
have  written  instantly  ;  for  I  have  an  im- 
mense curiosity  for  Plymouth  news,  and 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     73 

have  a  great  regard  for  my  young  cor- 
respondent. I  would  gladly  know  what 
books  Lucia  likes  to  read  when  nobody 
advises  her,  and  most  of  all  what  her 
thoughts  are  when  she  walks  alone  or  sits 
alone.  For,  though  I  know  that  Lucia  is 
the  happiest  of  girls  in  having  in  her  sis- 
ter so  wise  and  kind  a  guide,  yet  even 
her  aid  must  stop  when  she  has  put  the 
book  before  you  :  neither  sister  nor  bro- 
ther nor  mother  nor  father  can  think  for 
us :  in  the  little  private  chapel  of  your 
own  mind  none  but  God  and  you  can 
see  the  happy  thoughts  that  follow  each 
other,  the  beautiful  affections  that  spring 
there,  the  little  silent  hymns  that  are  sung 
there  at  morning  and  at  evening.  And  I 
hope  that  every  sun  that  shines,  every  star 
that  rises,  every  wind  that  blows  upon 
you  will  only  bring  you  better  thoughts 
and  sweeter  music.  Have  you  found  out 
that  Nature  is  always  talking  to  you,  es- 
pecially when  you  are  alone,  though  she 
has  not  the  gift  of  articulate  speech? 


74    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

Have  you  found  out  what  that  great  gray 
old  ocean  that  is  always  in  your  sight 
says  ?  Listen.  And  what  the  withered 
leaves  that  shiver  and  chatter  in  the  cold 
March  wind  ?  Only  listen.  The  Wind  is 
the  poet  of  the  World,  and  sometimes 
he  sings  very  pretty  summer  ballads,  and 
sometimes  very  terrible  odes  and  dirges. 
But  if  you  will  not  tell  me  the  little  soli- 
tary thoughts  that  I  am  asking  for,  what 
Nature  says  to  you,  and  what  you  say  to 
Nature,  at  least  you  can  tell  me  about 
your  books,  —  what  you  like  the  least  and 
what  the  best,  .  .  .  the  new  studies,  .  .  . 
the  drawing  and  the  music  and  the 
dancing,  —  and  fail  not  to  write  to  your 
friend, 

R.  WALDO  EMERSON. 

His  "  immense  curiosity  for  Plymouth 
news "  is  not  surprising ;  for  he  wrote 
this  letter  shortly  before  his  marriage 
with  Miss  Jackson,  of  Plymouth.  The 
"  wise  and  kind  "  sister  of  his  little  cor- 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     75 

respondent  was  Miss  Jackson's  closest 
friend,  and  stood  up  with  her  at  the 
wedding. 

Emerson  was  also  a  patriot,  a  man 
who  loved  his  country,  and  longed  for  it 
to  do  right.  "  One  thing,"  he  says,  "  is 
plain  for  all  men  of  common  sense  and 
common  conscience,  that  here,  here  in 
America  is  the  home  of  man."  "  America 
is  a  poem  in  our  eyes ; "  "its  ample 
geography  dazzles  the  imagination,  and 
it  will  not  wait  long  for  metres." 

"  For  He  that  flung  the  broad  blue  fold 

O'ermantling  land  and  sea, 
One  third  part  of  the  sky  unrolled 
For  the  banner  of  the  free." 

"  For  He  that  worketh  high  and  wise 

Nor  pauses  in  his  plan, 
Will  take  the  sun  out  of  the  skies 
Ere  freedom  out  of  man." 

Yet  his  greatest  patriotic  poem  is  not 
the  Fourth  of  July  Ode,  from  which  I 
have  been  quoting,  — 

("  O  tenderly  the  haughty  day 
Fills  his  blue  urn  with  fire,") 


76    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

and  not  the  "  Concord  Hymn,"  never  so 
familiar  that  we  can  read  without  a 
thrill,  - 

"  Here  once  the  embattled  farmers  stood, 
And  fired  the  shot  heard  round  the  world ;  " 

his  greatest  patriotic  poem  is  "  Volun- 
taries," which  treats  of  slavery  and  the 
conflict  between  North  and  South.  Free- 
dom loves  the  North  :  — 

"  The  snowflake  is  her  banner's  star  ; 
Her  stripes  the  boreal  streamers  are." 

It  is  this  poem  that  answers  the  terrible 
question,  — 

"  Who  shall  nerve  heroic  boys 
To  hazard  all  in  Freedom's  fight  ?  " 

with  that  mighty  quatrain,  — 

"  So  nigh  is  grandeur  to  our  dust, 
So  near  is  God  to  man, 
When  Duty  whispers  low,  'Thou  must,' 
The  youth  replies,  '  I  can.'  " 

Yet  Emerson  is  greatest,  not  as  philo- 
sopher, poet,  or  patriot,  but  as  helper  of 


CHILDREN   OF  CONCORD     77 

men.  He  made  men  better  by  simply 
walking  among  them.  I  have  spoken  of 
his  face  as  "  through-shine,"  as  transfig- 
ured with  love  and  refinement  and  wis- 
dom, with  the  vision  that  shall  not  fade,  — 

"  And  never  poor  beseeching  glance 
Shamed  that  sculptured  countenance." 

It  is  much  to  remember  him  as  I  do,  even 
in  his  old  age  ;  to  have  lived  with  those 
to  whom  he  was  "Mr.  Emerson,"  who 
had  known  him  early,  and  who  loved  him 
as  they  loved  no  other  man.  Some  of 
you  may  secretly  wonder  whether  he  was 
all  that  your  elders  have  called  him,  just 
as  I  used  to  wonder  whether  the  Par- 
thenon, the  great  temple  at  Athens,  was 
not  Professor  Norton's  building  rather 
than  mine,  whether  it  would  appeal  to 
such  as  I.  When  I  saw  the  Parthenon, 
even  in  its  ruin,  I  accepted  it  instantly 
and  forever ;  and  if  you  could  have  seen 
Emerson,  even  in  his  enfeebled  old  age, 
you  would  have  accepted  him. 


78    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

"  No  spring  nor  summer's  beauty  hath  such  grace 
As  I  have  seen  in  one  autumnal  face." 

Emerson's  face  was  the  highest  and  the 
loveliest  and  the  most  "  through-shine," 
because  his  life  was  all  this.  "Is  it  so 
bad?"  he  wrote  to  a  friend  who  had  said 
that  "  no  one  would  dare  to  uncover  the 
thoughts  of  a  single  hour,"  —  "  Is  it  so 
bad  ?  I  own  that  to  a  witness  worse  than 
myself  and  less  intelligent  I  should  not 
willingly  put  a  window  into  my  breast. 
But  to  a  witness  more  intelligent  and  vir- 
tuous than  I,  or  to  one  precisely  as  in- 
telligent and  well  intentioned,  I  have  no 
objection  to  uncover  my  heart."  "  He 
was  right,"  says  Mr.  Cabot,  "he  could 
only  have  gained  by  it."  "  It  was  good," 
says  Hawthorne  in  a  passage  that  Mr. 
Cabot  quotes,  "  to  meet  him  in  the  wood- 
paths  or  sometimes  in  our  avenue  with 
that  pure  intellectual  gleam  diffusing 
about  his  presence  like  the  garment  of  a 
shining  one  ;  and  he,  so  quiet,  so  simple, 
so  without  pretension,  encountering  each 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     79 

man  alive  as  if  expecting  to  receive  more 
than  he  would  impart  It  was  impossible 
to  dwell  in  his  vicinity  without  inhaling 
more  or  less  the  mountain  atmosphere 
of  his  lofty  thought." 

Emerson  himself  has  told  us  that 
"  Rectitude  scatters  favors  on  every  side 
without  knowing  it,  and  receives  with 
wonder  the  thanks  of  all  people."  So  it 
was  with  him ;  as  it  is  written  of  one 
whom  no  man  was  more  like,  "There 
went  virtue  out  of  him  and  healed  them 
all."  He  who  knew  sorrow  yet  was  glad, 
who  knew  self-distrust  yet  stood  self-reli- 
ant, who  knew  weakness  yet  remained 
strong,  who  knew  bitterness  yet  kept 
sweet,  whose  love  of  man  and  of  nature 
and  of  nature  in  man,  shone  through  his 
face,  and  through  every  page  he  wrote, 
—  he  seemed  to  those  near  him  the  very 
prophet  of  God,  preaching  hope,  free- 
dom, courage,  the  glory  of  a  high  and 
simple  life.  "The  sublime  vision,"  he 
says,  "  comes  to  the  pure  and  simple  soul 


8o    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

in  a  clean  and  chaste  body."  "  If  we  live 
truly,  we  shall  see  truly.  It  is  as  easy  for 
the  strong  man  to  be  strong  as  it  is  for 
the  weak  to  be  weak." 

"  Teach  me  your  mood,  O  patient  stars  ! 
Who  climb  each  night  the  ancient  sky, 
Leaving  on  space  no  shade,  no  scars, 
No  trace  of  age,  no  fear  to  die." 

In  his  presence  weak  men  were  ashamed 
that  they  had  ever  wondered  whether  it 
was  worth  while  to  live  ;  for  in  his  pre- 
sence, even  in  the  presence  of  what  he 
had  written,  it  was  harder  to  be  a  coward 
than  to  be  brave. 

Of  young  people  —  not  children,  but 
young  men  and  women  —  he  was  the 
supreme  helper ;  and  we  must  remember 
that  it  was  not  only  neighbors  and  friends 
who  loved  him,  not  only  those  that 
touched  the  hem  of  his  garment  who 
were  made  whole.  His  voice,  his  manner, 
his  presence,  charmed  and  refined  all  who 
came  near  him ;  but  his  written  words  put 
courage  into  ten  thousand  hearts. 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     81 

"Trust  thyself;  every  heart  vibrates 
to  that  iron  string." 

"  We  will  walk  on  our  own  feet ;  we 
will  work  with  our  own  hands ;  we  will 
speak  our  own  minds." 

"  If  the  single  man  plant  himself  in- 
domitably on  his  instincts  and  there 
abide,  the  huge  world  will  come  round 
to  him." 

"  We  are  parlor  soldiers.  We  shun  the 
rugged  battle  of  fate  where  strength  is 
born." 

"But  we  sit  and  weep  in  vain.  The 
voice  of  the  Almighty  saith,  '  Up  and 
onward  forever  more ! '  " 

"  Man  is  timid  and  apologetic ;  he  is 
no  longer  upright ;  he  dares  not  say,  '  I 
think,'  '  I  am,'  but  quotes  some  saint  or 
sage.  He  is  ashamed  before  the  blade  of 
grass  or  the  blowing  rose.  These  roses 
under  my  window  make  no  reference  to 
former  roses  or  to  better  ones  ;  they  are 
for  what  they  are ;  they  exist  with  God 
to-day." 


82    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

"  I  call  upon  you,  young  men,  to  obey 
your  heart  and  be  the  nobility  of  this 
land." 

Here  is  the  star  to  which  many  an  awk- 
ward and  timid  country  lad  has  hitched 
his  wagon  ;  the  strong  and  steady  light 
to  which  the  lights  that  flickered  in  a 
thousand  hearts  have  flashed  their  brav- 
est answer.  This  gentle  scholar  was  a 
man,  and  a  man  who  inspired  others 
with  his  own  manliness.  There  was  in 
his  philosophy  no  room  for  the  weak  and 
lazy.  With  all  his  visions  he  had  a  keen 
sense  of  the  value  of  time,  and  expressed 
it  (with  more  truth  than  poetry)  in  "  The 
Visit : "  — 

"  Askest,  '  How  long  thou  shalt  stay? 
Devastator  of  the  day !  " 

"  Do  your  work,"  he  says,  "  and  I  shall 
know  you.  Do  your  work  and  you  shall 
reinforce  yourself.  Do  that  which  is  as- 
signed you,  and  you  cannot  hope  too 
much  or  dare  too  much." 

"  The  distinction  and  end  of  a  soundly 


CHILDREN   OF  CONCORD     83 

constituted  man  is  his  labor.  Use  is  in- 
scribed on  all  his  faculties.  Use  is  the 
end  to  which  he  exists.  As  the  tree  ex- 
ists for  its  fruit,  so  a  man  for  his  work. 
A  fruitless  plant,  an  idle  animal,  does  not 
stand  in  the  universe." 

He  believed  in  work  that  left  no  time 
for  worrying :  — 

"  But  blest  is  he  who  playing  deep  yet  haply  asks 

not  why, 

Too  busied  with  the  crowded  hour  to  fear  to  live 
or  die." 

And  he  believed  in  work  through  every- 
thing, — 

"On    bravely    through     the    sunshine   and    the 

showers ! 
Time  hath  his  work  to  do  and  we  have  ours." 

Such  was  the  courage  of  his  preaching 
and  of  his  life.  We  are  to  be  ourselves 
in  the  present,  not  to  make  ourselves  like 
anybody  else  or  like  what  we  ourselves 
have  been.  If  we  are  inconsistent,  no 
matter;  if  we  are  misunderstood,  no 
matter.  "  With  consistency,"  he  says,  "  a 


84    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

great  soul  has  simply  nothing  to  do.  He 
may  as  well  concern  himself  with  his 
shadow  on  the  wall.  Speak  what  you 
think  now  in  hard  words,  and  to-morrow 
speak  what  to-morrow  thinks  in  hard 
words  again,  though  it  contradict  every- 
thing you  said  to-day.  '  Ah,  so  you  shall 
be  sure  to  be  misunderstood ! '  Is  it  so 
bad,  then,  to  be  misunderstood  ?  .  .  . 
Every  pure  and  wise  spirit  that  ever 
took  flesh  "  has  been  misunderstood. 

"  Whenever  a  mind  is  simple  and  re- 
ceives a  divine  wisdom,  old  things  pass 
away,  —  means,  teachers,  texts,  temples 
fall ;  it  lives  now,  and  absorbs  past  and 
future  into  the  present  hour." 

"  Our  helm  is  given  up  to  a  better 
guidance  than  our  own  ;  the  course  of 
events  is  quite  too  strong  for  any  helms- 
man, and  our  little  wherry  is  taken  in 
tow  by  the  ship  of  the  great  Admiral, 
which  knows  the  way,  and  has  the  force 
to  draw  men  and  states  and  planets  to 
their  good." 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     85 

And  there  was  no  room  in  his  philo- 
sophy for  the  sickly  and  discontented. 
As  one  of  "the  first  obvious  rules  of 
life,"  he  says,  "  Get  health."  "  And  the 
best  part  of  health,"  he  adds,  "  is  fine  dis- 
position. It  is  more  essential  than  talent, 
even  in  the  works  of  talent.  Nothing  will 
supply  the  want  of  sunshine  to  peaches, 
and  to  make  knowledge  valuable,  you 
must  have  the  cheerfulness  of  wisdom." 

"  I  know  how  easy  it  is  to  men  of  the 
world  to  look  grave,  and  sneer  at  your 
sanguine  youth  and  its  glittering  dreams. 
But  I  find  the  gayest  castles  in  the  air 
that  were  ever  piled  far  better  for  com- 
fort and  for  use  than  the  dungeons  in 
the  air  that  are  daily  dug  and  caverned 
out  by  grumbling,  discontented  people." 

Nor  is  cheerfulness  for  the  young 
only  :  — 

"  Spring  still  makes  spring  in  the  mind 
When  sixty  years  are  told  ; 
Love  wakes  anew  this  throbbing  heart 
And  we  are  never  old. 


86    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

Over  the  winter  glaciers 

I  see  the  summer  glow, 

And  through  the  wild-piled  snow-drift 

The  warm  rosebuds  below." 

Even  though  old  age  bring  loss  of  power, 
it  need  not  bring  loss  of  cheerfulness :  — 

"  As  the  bird  trims  her  to  the  gale, 
I  trim  myself  to  the  storm  of  time  ; 
I  man  the  rudder,  reef  the  sail, 
Obey  the  voice  at  eve  obeyed  at  prime, 
'  Lowly  faithful,  banish  fear, 
Right  onward  drive  unharmed ; 
The  port,  well  worth  the  cruise,  is  near, 
And  every  wave  is  charmed.' " 

If  disaster  come,  there  is  good  in  it. 
"  We  learn  geology  the  morning  after  the 
earthquake." 

George  Eliot  tells  us  of  a  woman  who 
seemed  among  other  people  like  a  fine 
quotation  from  the  Bible  in  a  paragraph 
of  a  newspaper.  Something  like  this 
might  be  said  of  Emerson,  who  brought 
into  everyday  life  the  help  that  cometh 
from  the  hills.  "  I  believe,"  says  an  old 
friend  of  his,  "  no  man  ever  had  so  deep 


CHILDREN   OF   CONCORD     87 

an  influence  as  he  had  on  the  life  and 
thought  of  the  young  people  of  his  day. 
I  think  there  are  many  who  would  say 
.  .  .  that  it  has  been  one  of  the  chief 
privileges  of  their  life  to  have  lived  at 
the  same  time  with  him." 

I  have  tried  to  show  you  what  Emer- 
son has  meant  to  American  youth  ;  how 
he  has  stood  for  pure  life,  high  thought, 
brave  speech,  patient  and  cheerful  work  ; 
how  he  found  in  everything  poetry  and 
a  man's  poetry,  and  revealed  that  poetry 
to  the  world  :  but  this  is  not  all.  It  is  as 
easy  to  "  put  a  girdle  round  about  the 
earth  in  forty  minutes  "  as  to  compass 
in  half  an  hour  a  great  man.  I  might 
speak  of  him  as  a  forerunner  of  Darwin. 
"Man,"  he  says,  "is  no  upstart  in  the 
creation,  but  has  been  prophesied  in 
nature  for  a  thousand,  thousand  ages 
before  he  appeared.  ...  His  limbs  are 
only  a  more  exquisite  organization  —  say 
rather  the  finish  —  of  the  rudimental 


88    ADDRESS  TO  THE  SCHOOL 

forms  that  have  been  already  sweeping 
the  sea  and  creeping  in  the  mud  ;  the 
brother  of  his  hand  is  even  now  cleaving 
the  Arctic  sea  in  the  fin  of  the  whale, 
and  innumerable  ages  since  was  pawing 
the  marsh  in  the  flipper  of  the  saurian." 
I  might  speak  of  his  Yankee  humor,  or 
of  his  tenderness  and  romance,  — 
"  The  little  Shakspeare  in  the  maiden's  heart 
Makes  Romeo  of  a  ploughboy  on  his  cart ;  " 

but  I  purposely  let  them  pass  with  this 
bare  mention  (as  I  let  pass  "  The  Tit- 
mouse," "The  Rhodora,"  "The  Moun- 
tain and  the  Squirrel,"  "The  Humble- 
bee  ") ;  for  I  wish  you  this  day  to  think 
of  Emerson,  living  and  dead,  as  a  high 
and  helpful  friend.  There  is  no  better 
company,  no  better  society,  than  his. 
Read  him  and  re-read  him.  Do  not  try 
to  write  like  him  :  he  would  have  you 
write  like  none  but  yourselves  ;  and  be- 
sides, his  style  is  his  and  his  only.  Do 
not  try  to  be  like  him,  except  so  far  as  in 
being  your  best  selves  you  come  into 


89 

the  likeness  of  all  who  are  good  and 
true.  When  you  read  him,  do  not  be 
troubled  if  you  lose  the  thread  of  his 
thought ;  he  himself  did  that ;  yet,  as  a 
young  man  once  said  of  him,  "  His  say- 
ings are  like  the  stars,  which  are  scat- 
tered disorderly  but  together  make  a 
firmament  of  light." 

"  Hundreds  of  people,"  says  Ruskin, 
"  can  talk  for  one  who  can  think ;  but 
thousands  can  think  for  one  who  can  see. 
To  see  clearly  is  poetry,  prophecy,  and 
religion  all  in  one." 

This  man  who  walked  your  streets,  and 
loved  them,  spoke  with  a  voice  that  is 
rare  in  any  race  or  time  ;  he  thought  as 
it  is  given  to  few  to  think  ;  and  he  saw. 
We  have  had  no  man  like  him.  I  will 
not  say  that  we  have  had  none  so  great. 
Lincoln  may  have  been  greater.  They 
are  so  different  that  we  cannot  compare 
the  two  ;  and  yet,  as  Lincoln's  procla- 
mation brought  life  and  hope  to  cap- 
tive hearts,  so  did  the  brave  word  that 


90    TO  THE  SCHOOL  CHILDREN 

Emerson  spoke  flash  on  the  souls  of  men 
the  truth  that  they  were  slaves  no  more ; 
that  each  might  and  must  stand  to  his 
work  erect  and  strong,  since  nature  and 
God  were  his  very  own.  The  eyes  of  the 
blind  were  opened,  and  the  ears  of  the 
deaf  unstopped  ;  "  for  he  came  that  they 
might  have  life,  and  that  they  might  have 
it  more  abundantly." 


COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 
AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE 


COMMENCEMENT    ADDRESS    AT 
WELLESLEY  COLLEGE 

THE  last  weeks  of  a  Senior  resemble  in 
one  respect  the  first  weeks  of  a  Fresh- 
man :  they  are  too  complexly  active,  too 
bewildering,  for  thought.  Professors,  ex- 
aminations, literary  work,  friendships, 
relatives,  sweethearts,  and  plans  of  life 
whirl  through  a  Senior's  head  and  set 
it  whirling  with  them.  Then,  as  always, 
after  exaltation  comes  depression.  Clear- 
ing up  after  anything  is  a  searching  test 
of  cheerfulness ;  and  clearing  up  after 
four  of  the  richest  years  that  youth 
can  know,  sending  away  your  furni- 
ture from  the  room  you  love,  bidding 
good-by  to  scores  of  fellow  students 
whose  lives  have  been  very  near  your 
own,  and  doing  it  all  with  the  reaction- 


94    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

ary  weariness  that  follows  prolonged 
excitement,  is  sad  business,  even  for  a 
sound-minded  girl  who  is  eager  to  do 
her  part  in  a  newly  opening  world.  On 
the  morning  after  Class  Day  in  Cam- 
bridge, some  years  ago,  an  uncommonly 
healthy  Senior  who  had  played  in  the 
University  football  team  and  who  could 
not  be  charged  with  maudlin  sentiment, 
got  up  at  five,  sat  on  the  steps  of  Uni- 
versity Hall  in  the  middle  of  the  College 
Yard,  and  wept.  Before  he  went  away, 
he  said,  he  must  have  the  Yard  for  once 
to  himself :  — 

" '  T  were  profanation  of  our  joys 
To  tell  the  laity  our  love." 

In  this  reaction,  when  you  have  shuf- 
fled off  the  coil  of  your  last  college  days 
and  find  yourself  face  to  face  with  a  new 
life  or  with  the  return  to  an  old  one,  you 
are  prone  to  ask,  "  What  has  it  all  been 
for  ?  Am  I  fitter  for  the  life  I  must  live 
than  if  I  had  been  living  it  four  years 
already  ?  College  has  been  fascinating, 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     95 

no  doubt ;  but  many  fascinating  things 
do  not  pay.  I  have  opened  several  doors 
to  knowledge,  and  have  learned  that, 
work  as  hard  and  as  long  as  I  may,  I 
can  never  see  the  thousandth  part  of 
that  to  which  a  single  one  of  them  may 
lead ;  I  have  formed  friendships  that  will 
last ;  I  have  won  something  with  which 
I  would  not  part  for  money  and  without 
which  I  can  no  more  imagine  myself 
than  I  can  conceive  myself  annihilated. 
These  college  years  have  become  an  in- 
extricable part  of  me;  yet  am  I,  after 
all,  happier  and  better  than  if  I  had 
never  tasted  their  sweetness  —  had  never 
caught  glimpses  of  ideals  that  in  every- 
day life  may  be  my  rebuke  and  my  de- 
spair?" In  a  small  degree  you  feel  as 
men  and  women  feel  when  they  wake  to 
the  truth  that  their  elders  have  moved 
on ;  that  they  themselves  are  now  the 
older  generation  to  whom  the  younger 
turns  for  counsel ;  that  other  people  will 
lean  on  them,  and  that  the  days  when 


96    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

they  may  lean  on  other  people  are  gone 
and  gone  forever. 

When  we  say  "What  is  it  for?"  let 
us  first  take  care  to  recognize,  as  college 
people  should,  many  things  for  which  a 
life  is  worth  living  besides  what  is  com- 
monly called  practical.  Lowell  reminds 
us  that  the  question  "What  is  it  good 
for?"  "would  abolish  the  rose  and  be 
answered  triumphantly  by  the  cabbage." 
"The  danger  of  the  prosaic  type  of 
mind,"  he  adds,  "  lies  in  the  stolid  sense 
of  superiority  which  blinds  it  to  every- 
thing ideal,  to  the  use  of  anything  that 
does  not  serve  the  practical  purposes 
of  life."  Now  a  man  whose  scheme  of 
life  is  a  cabbage  scheme,  who  can  go 
through  college  with  no  glimpse  of  the 
vision  without  which  all  is  dark  and 
dead,  is  too  abnormal  for  our  purposes 
to-day :  and  if  this  is  true  of  a  man,  it  is 
truer  of  a  woman ;  for  in  every  part  of 
life  women  take  more  kindly  to  the  ideal. 
Yet  if  a  college  graduate  tries  to  earn  a 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     97 

living  by  raising  cabbages,  or  by  keep- 
ing hens,  or  by  any  other  unimaginative 
occupation,  I  believe  (so  deep  is  my 
faith  in  college  training)  that  he  or  she 
will  make  up,  even  in  such  a  prosaic 
field,  for  the  years  that  might  seem  lost. 
"  They  jump  farthest,"  says  Ben  Jonson, 
"  that  fetch  their  race  largest."  President 
Hyde  has  pointed  out  that  the  apparent 
delaying  of  a  life  work  by  the  years  at 
college  is  like  the  stopping  of  a  stream 
by  a  dam  to  give  it  accumulated  power. 
He  speaks  of  men ;  but  what  he  says 
applies  to  women  also.  Those  persons 
who  disparage  a  college  education  for 
men  point  to  the  self-made  men  of  busi- 
ness who  have  climbed  high :  but  of 
these  self-made  men  the  best  openly  ex- 
press as  the  great  regret  of  their  lives 
their  want  of  a  college  education ;  and 
of  the  worst,  many,  I  suspect,  grieve  in 
their  heart  of  hearts  for  the  education 
they  decry.  They  think  perhaps  of  so- 
cial advantage,  of  culture,  of  knowledge ; 


98     COMMENCEMENT   ADDRESS 

they  might  well  think  also  of  the  grasp 
of  a  trained  mind  and  of  the  wisdom 
that  should  come  with  a  wider  outlook. 
Those  who  disparage  a  college  educa- 
tion for  women  go  further  and  wound 
deeper.  "  To  a  woman,"  they  say,  "  such 
an  education  is  a  social  afoadvantage ; 
for  it  spoils  her.  The  ideal  of  manhood 
is  one  thing,  that  of  womanhood  another. 
Learning  and  the  learned  professions 
are  for  men;  public  life  is  for  men.  It 
remains  for  women  to  make  themselves 
charming  through  their  accomplishments 
and  to  live  in  their  affections.  A  mascu- 
line woman  is  as  bad  as  an  effeminate 
man ;  and  a  pedantic  woman  is  worse 
than  either.  Moreover,  studying  mars 
beauty,  for  which  every  woman  longs, 
whether  she  admits  it  or  not,  and  to 
which  every  man,  whatever  he  may  say, 
pays  gratifying  homage."  All  this  has 
been  said  so  often  that  I  hesitate  to  re- 
peat it ;  yet,  however  familiar  it  is,  and 
however  false  it  may  be,  it  raises  a  ques- 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     99 

tion  that  is  vital.  "In  college  study," 
said  a  great  man,  "it  seems  conclu- 
sively proved  that  women  can  do  all 
that  men  can  do  —  we  do  not  yet  know 
at  what  sacrifice."  Is  there  necessarily  a 
sacrifice  ? 

First,  as  to  pedantry.  No  doubt  we 
have  all  seen  young  women  in  whom 
college  education  developed  a  pedantry 
to  which  they  were  predisposed ;  and 
we  have  seen  just  such  young  men.  Yet 
among  the  agents  for  knocking  ped- 
antry out  of  young  people  I  should  count 
college  life.  In  college  if  we  appear 
pedantic,  our  friends  contrive  to  tell  us 
so  in  ways  hard  to  forget ;  and  besides, 
the  more  we  know,  the  more  we  know 
we  don't  know.  Just  as  the  study  of 
Anglo-Saxon  is  the  best  remedy  for  mis- 
taken purism,  so  in  every  part  of  learn- 
ing, one  good  look  at  the  mountains  of 
knowledge,  however  far  away,  shows  us 
pedantry  and  dogmatism  as  the  miser- 
able little  molehills  that  they  really  are. 


ioo     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

After  all,  learning  is  no  necessary  part  of 
the  equipment  of  a  pedant.  Mr.  Casau- 
bon  was  no  more  a  pedant  than  Mr. 
Micawber,  nor  Anna  Comnena  than  Mrs. 
Malaprop.  Nor  are  masculine  women 
commoner  in  college  than  out  of  it ;  there 
is  no  sex  in  learning  and  nothing  un- 
gentle. Nor  does  college  study,  mingled 
with  the  out-of-door  life  in  a  place  like 
this,  hurt  either  complexion  or  constitu- 
tion so  much  as  parties  and  theatre- 
going.  I  doubt  whether  any  one  of  you 
has  ever  lived  or  will  ever  live  a  healthier 
life  than  she  has  lived  here,  or  a  life  of 
higher  and  more  womanly  ideals.  One 
girl  means  to  be  a  teacher ;  another, 
though  not  a  teacher  or  anything  with 
a  distinct  name,  means  to  be  an  alert, 
intelligent,  helpful  member  of  society. 
Each  comes  to  college  that,  working  and 
playing  with  other  girls  both  like  and  un- 
like herself,  she  may  look  wider  and 
deeper  over  and  into  human  life,  —  not 
that  she  may  be  less  womanly,  but 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     101 

that  she  may  be  more  of  a  woman. 
If  now  and  then  the  love  of  learning 
and  the  discovery  of  scholarly  talent 
lead  a  girl  to  give  up  all  thought  of 
a  domestic  life,  it  is  not  pedantry  or 
masculinity;  it  is  rather  the  deliberate 
dedication  of  her  strength  to  what  she 
believes  to  be  its  fitting  service.  "  I  shall 
never  forget,"  said  a  college  boy,  "  the 
way  Professor  X  talked  of  ethics  —  as  if 
ethics  were  his  daughter."  This  is  the 
way  some  women  feel  about  learning,  or 
philanthropy,  or  any  other  great  cause 
to  which  they  give  their  lives  ;  and  who 
shall  say  that  they  are  wrong? 

The  one  serious  danger  which  I  can 
see  in  a  college  education  for  women  is 
the  danger  of  intellectual  unrest,  of  chaf- 
ing, in  the  daily  duties  of  later  life,  at  the 
meagreness  of  intellectual  opportunity. 
A  man,  even  by  those  who  regard  his 
college  life  as  an  essential  social  experi- 
ence to  be  achieved  with  the  least  possi- 
ble study,  is  expected  on  leaving  college 


102    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

to  get  work  at  once.  A  woman  is  ex- 
pected to  get  it  if  there  is  nobody  to 
support  her :  otherwise  she  may  go  home 
and  may  find  between  her  college  life 
and  the  home  life  that  she  reenters  a 
perilous  gap.  Suppose  she  goes  out  into 
what  is  called  society.  After  four  years 
of  steady  employment,  of  constant,  stim- 
ulating friendship,  of  high  intellectual 
privilege,  and  of  rapid  growth  in  taste 
and  knowledge,  how  mean  and  weari- 
some and  inexcusable  seems  the  round 
of  parties  and  calls,  how  cheap  much  of 
what  she  used  to  regard  as  intellectual ! 
She  may  have  to  live  in  a  town  where 
the  leading  thinkers  discuss  the  attri- 
butes of  "  the  pagan  god  Ze-us  "  and  find 
the  highest  achievement  of  literature  in 
the  chariot  race  from  "  Ben  Hur."  How 
shall  she  adjust  herself  to  such  a  life  as 
this  ?  how  live  in  it  with  modest  strength  ? 
Or  suppose  her  parents  are  country  peo- 
ple and  she  goes  home  to  help  her 
mother.  Disgusted  with  herself  as  she 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE    103 

may  be  at  the  discovery,  she  may  find 
that  her  family,  though  no  less  lovable 
than  of  old,  are,  for  steady  company,  less 
interesting.  As  President  Eliot  says  of 
university  football  players  after  a  great 
contest,  "the  return  to  normal  life  is 
difficult;"  or  —  to  cite  and  adapt  the 
words  of  another  man —  "  She  has  looked 
her  last  upon  the  world  of  art  and  lit- 
erature and  intellectual  delight,  within 
whose  borders  she  has  been  permitted 
to  dwell  for  four  years,  tasting  of  the 
pleasures  that  are  not  her  birthright." 

Or  suppose  a  girl  teaches  school  and 
finds  herself  in  a  remote  town  where  she 
is  sandwiched  between  crude  children 
on  one  side  and  a  half-educated  superin- 
tendent and  several  illiterate  committee 
men  on  the  other  —  a  town  whose  soci- 
ety is  undermined  by  gossip  and  whose 
school  system  is  honeycombed  with  poli- 
tics. Is  this  the  promised  joy  of  the  in- 
tellectual life  ?  Or  suppose  she  sees  the 
need  of  trained  women  in  stenography, 


104    COMMENCEMENT   ADDRESS 

the  quick  accuracy  of  hand  and  brain 
which  it  demands,  the  intimate  know- 
ledge of  business  which  it  develops,  the 
posts  of  responsibility  to  which  it  may 
lead.  In  her  new  enthusiasm  she  begins 
work  at  a  business  school.  She  finds 
there  few  fellow  students  whose  ideals 
and  tastes  are  hers ;  but  she  is  there  for 
work,  not  for  companionship,  and  she 
keeps  on.  At  last,  unless  she  has  excep- 
tional fortune  or  uses  exceptional  care, 
she  may  find  that,  in  a  business  office, 
with  a  beginner's  pay,  with  long  hours 
and  short  vacations,  she  has  much  to 
bear  from  men  who,  whether  they  pass 
for  gentlemen  or  not,  are  not  gentlemen 
to  her.  How  can  she,  with  the  refinement 
and  the  love  of  leadership  which  her 
intellectual  life  has  fostered,  endure  a 
drudging  inferiority  to  men  whom  she 
knows  herself  to  be  immeasurably  above  ? 
A  man  must  submit  to  it  in  the  begin- 
ning ;  but  a  man  is  of  coarser  fibre. 
Besides,  a  man  knows  that  hard  and  able 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     105 

work  will  bring  a  man's  reward  ;  whereas 
a  woman  knows  that,  partly  because 
people  are  prejudiced  but  chiefly  be- 
cause men  and  women  are  eternally  un- 
like, she  cannot  hope  for  those  positions 
which  demand  continuity  of  physical 
strength,  grasp  (not  merely  insight)  in 
meeting  large  problems  day  after  day, 
and  unprotected  association  with  all 
kinds  of  people.  Women  who  can  fill 
such  positions  are  so  few  that  we  may 
pass  them  by.  As  the  power,  not  on  the 
throne  but  behind  it,  as  the  leaven  that 
lifts  men  to  higher  things,  as  the  stand- 
ard of  unselfishness,  devotion,  purity, 
and  faith,  women  may  at  some  time  re- 
form and  transform  the  business  world  : 
but  they  will  not  often  be  good  heads 
of  business  houses ;  they  may  be  good 
physicians,  but  they  will  rarely  be  good 
lawyers;  they  may  be,  and  often  are, 
mentally  and  morally  head  and  shoul- 
ders above  the  preachers  to  whom  they 
listen  with  steady  loyalty,  but  they  will 


io6   COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

be  better  ministers'  wives  than  minis- 
ters. 

Or  suppose  a  girl  marries  and  keeps 
house.  With  the  constant  thought  for 
her  husband  and  children,  with  the  con- 
stant details  of  a  housekeeper's  routine, 
how  shall  she  feed  her  mind  ?  Possibly 
her  husband,  in  a  dark  little  office  all 
day,  cannot  feed  his  ;  but  he  is  a  man,  and 
cares  less.  "  Was  all  my  training,  then," 
she  cries,  "a  training  for  servitude?  " 

How  long  it  takes  us  to  learn  that  "  the 
word  of  God  is  not  bound  ; "  that  what 
is  enslaved  in  us  is  not  the  soul,  which 
is  our  birthright,  but  a  changeling  that 
while  we  slept  has  stolen  into  its  place ; 
and  that  what  enslaves  is  not  the  routine 
of  life  but  the  chafing  at  the  routine ! 
how  long  it  takes  us  to  see  that  every 
life  without  a  light  in  it  is  dull,  that  no 
life  with  a  light  in  it  can  be  dull,  and  that 
whether  the  light  is  there  or  not  is  a 
matter  of  our  own  will !  As  we  see  deeper 
and  deeper  into  the  complex  sorrow  of 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     107 

the  world  about  us,  we  cannot  be  gay 
of  heart,  but  we  may  and  we  should  be 
happy ;  and  in  hard  work  lighted  by 
hope  and  courage  and  love  we  may  learn 
that  the  constancy  of  routine  is  the  con- 
stancy of  a  friend.  Life  is  sure  to  be 
complicated,  and  it  may  be  sad :  but  to 
a  right-minded  man  or  woman  there  is 
one  thing  it  can  never  be  —  it  can  never 
be  uninteresting ;  and  there  is  one  thing 
it  must  always  be  —  it  must  always  be 
active.  Moreover,  in  this  activity  every 
particle  of  learning  or  of  training  or  of 
mere  social  experience  that  your  college 
has  given  you  is  bound  to  tell.  If  what- 
ever you  do  is  not  done  more  intelli- 
gently and  more  earnestly  for  your  col- 
lege education,  the  trouble  is  not  in  the 
college  education  but  in  you :  you  are 
the  wrong  kind  of  girl. 

If  you  have  to  earn  a  living  and  begin 
at  the  bottom,  make  the  bottom  stronger 
because  you  are  there.  Then  trust  to 
time.  So  few  workers  in  proportion  to 


io8    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

the  whole  number  give  themselves  in- 
telligently, loyally,  and  unreservedly  to 
their  immediate  duty  that  if  you  thus  give 
yourself  you  cannot  but  succeed.  Thou- 
sands of  people  in  small  positions  whine 
because  their  talents  are  thrown  away  — 
because  their  ability  has  no  elbow-room. 
It  is  not  elbow-room  that  they  need  ;  it 
is  "  elbow  -  grease  ;  "  it  is  energy  and 
strength.  Their  very  whining  shows  that 
they  are  too  small  for  the  places  they  are 
in  now.  When  the  right  kind  of  person 
has  too  small  a  place,  he  does  his  work 
so  well  as  to  make  the  place  bigger ; 
people  see  in  it  more  than  they  ever  saw 
before.  He  who  laments  that  an  unap- 
preciative  world  has  slighted  his  talents 
is  a  more  wicked  and  slothful  servant 
than  he  who  hides  his  one  talent  in  a 
napkin.  Do  your  work  and  you  will 
succeed.  Your  idea  of  success  may  be 
different  from  what  it  would  be  if  you 
had  not  come  to  college.  I  should  be 
sorry  if  it  were  not ;  for  these  four  years 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     109 

have  brought  you  possessions  which  will 
transform  your  whole  life. 

Among  these  possessions  is  college 
loyalty.  We  sometimes  forget  that  from 
the  moment  of  our  entering  a  college  we 
have  become  a  part  of  it,  and  it  has  be- 
come a  part  of  us,  inevitably  and  forever. 
We  owe  it  money  perhaps  ;  allegiance 
certainly  and  always.  It  is  for  us  to  keep 
our  Alma  Mater  honored  and  wise  and 
young.  "We  are  all  better  Harvard  men 
now,"  said  the  president  of  the  Harvard 
Club  of  Chicago,  "than  when  we  were 
in  college ; "  and  he  was  right.  Much 
as  you  love  Wellesley  to-day,  your  love 
of  her  will  deepen  with  the  years  and 
will  take  on  more  and  more  of  the  spirit 
of  high  romance  till  you  yourselves  will 
marvel  at  the  magic  of  the  Alma  Mater's 
name.  "  This,"  as  Mr.  Justice  Holmes 
said  of  something  else,  "  is  that  little 
touch  of  the  superfluous  which  is  neces- 
sary. Necessary  as  art  is  necessary  and 
knowledge  which  serves  no  mechanical 


i  io    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

end.  Superfluous  only  as  glory  is  super- 
fluous, or  a  bit  of  red  ribbon  that  a  man 
would  die  to  win." 

Besides  drawing  the  breath  of  college 
loyalty,  which  may  find  expression  in  a 
thousand  ways,  the  graduate  should  have 
achieved  ability  to  look  at  more  than  one 
side  of  a  question.  Men  who  "  know 
black  and  white  but  not  gray  "  find  much 
less  discomfort  and  much  more  self-satis- 
faction than  men  who  know  gray  in  all 
shades,  and  to  whom  scarcely  anything 
is  unquestioned  white  or  black.  Men 
who  see  every  object  as  if  it  lay  between 
two  walls,  and  see  it  clearly  and  see  it 
hard,  have  less  to  keep  them  awake 
nights  than  men  who  know  no  walls  and 
see  every  object  as  one  part  of  a  wide- 
spreading  and  complex  universe;  but 
only  the  latter  can  be  wise.  There  is  no 
wisdom  without  acute  sensitiveness  such 
as  gives  to  any  soul  but  the  sublimely 
great  varied  and  constant  pain.  Yet  who 
would  shrink  from  the  pain  of  wider  sym- 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     in 

pathy,  of  quicker  discernment,  of  more 
abundant  life?  From  the  beginning, 
knowledge  has  brought  its  sorrow.  Ca- 
pacity for  keener  joy  means  capacity 
for  sharper  grief:  without  capacity  for 
sharper  grief  there  is  no  capacity  for 
higher  service ;  and  the  glory  of  the 
highest  service  was  the  Cross. 

Whatever  you  do,  do  it  heart  and  soul, 
but  do  not  sell  yourself  to  it :  — 

"  Because  a  man  has  shop  to  mind 
In  time  and  place,  since  flesh  must  live, 
Needs  spirit  lack  all  life  behind, 
All  stray  thoughts,  fancies  fugitive, 
All  loves  except  what  trade  can  give  ? 

But  —  shop  each  day  and  all  day  long ! 
Friend,  your  good  angel  slept,  your  star 
Suffered  eclipse,  fate  did  you  wrong ! 
From  where  these  sorts  of  treasures  are 
There  should  our  hearts  be  —  Christ,  how  far  !  " 

"  The  trouble  with  that  man,"  said  one 
of  our  best  university  chemists  of  one  of 
his  best  pupils,  "is  that  he  is  nothing 
but  a  chemist." 


112     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

Yet  we  must  not  make  shop  one  thing 
and  life  another ;  and  since  we  must  not 
make  life  shop,  we  must  make  shop  life. 
Into  everything  we  do  we  must  try  to 
put  leaven.  If  asked  for  what  college 
stands  beyond  all  else,  I  should  be 
tempted  to  say,  "  For  the  high  meaning 
of  the  everyday  act  and  the  everyday 
life ;  for  the  beauty  of  work,  of  unselfish 
devoted  work,  with  ambition  to  do  the 
appointed  task."  If  a  higher  task  comes, 
take  it  as  you  took  the  lower  —  always 
with  scrupulous  fidelity  and  with  that 
touch  of  something  beyond  mere  accu- 
racy which  makes  fidelity  heroic.  I  have 
seen  men  and  women  filling  subordinate 
positions  with  this  kind  of  heroism  — 
men  and  women  whose  lives,  shut  close 
as  it  seemed  on  every  side,  would  have 
been  arid  as  the  sand  if,  in  their  hearts, 
they  had  not  said,  like  Christian's  daugh- 
ter in  "  The  Pilgrim's  Progress,"  "  I  pur- 
pose never  to  have  a  clog  to  my  soul." 

I  say  all  this  because  there  was  never 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE    113' 

greater  need  of  that  fidelity  whereby  the 
drudgery  of  daily  life  becomes  transfig- 
ured. "  Much  of  my  life,"  said  President 
Eliot  once,  "  is  what  many  persons  would 
call  drudgery.  Within  a  few  days  I  have 
gone  through  the  entire  salary  list  of  the 
instructors  and  assistants  in  the  univer- 
sity; and  I  do  it  every  year."  No  one 
knows  better  than  he  that  the  president 
of  a  college  or  the  president  of  a  country  is 
more  slave  than  king,  and  that  nowadays 
a  king  is  a  kind  of  slave.  Success  does 
not  and  cannot  mean  escape  from  work. 
Yet  on  every  side  we  see  men  demand- 
ing a  full  share  of  the  luxuries  of  life  and 
a  decrease  of  its  labor.  Eight  hours  of 
eager  unremitting  work  may  be  enough 
for  a  mechanic  or  for  a  common  laborer ; 
but  how  many  give  even  that  ?  How  a 
little  or  a  good  deal  is  shaved  off  each 
end  of  the  day  and  off  both  sides  of  the 
middle !  how  languidly  and  perfunctorily 
the  task  is  done !  Street  laborers,  elbow 
to  elbow,  feebly  lift  their  picks  a  few 


114    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

inches  above  the  surface  of  the  earth  and 
trust  the  fall  to  the  force  of  gravity; 
washerwomen  charge  you  by  the  hour 
for  eating  copious  and  frequent  meals 
in  your  kitchen  ;  carpenters  light  their 
pipes  over  your  sawdust  and  shavings 
and  chat  pleasantly  at  your  expense  with 
whoever  passes  by.  "Less  work  for 
more  money  1 "  is  the  constant  cry ;  and 
if  the  cost  of  living  increases  (as  it  must 
when  everybody  does  less  work  for  more 
money),  less  work  and  more  money  still. 
I  have  known  a  man  hauling  stone  to 
leave  a  block  in  a  crooked  woods  road 
where  it  wrecked  the  next  carriage,  be- 
cause five  o'clock  had  come  and  nothing 
(with  an  oath)  should  make  him  work 
after  five  o'clock.  Charles  Dudley  War- 
ner prophesies  that,  when  labor  gets 
to  be  ten  dollars  a  day,  the  workmen 
will  not  come  at  all  —  "  they  will  send 
their  cards."  Everywhere  men  proceed 
on  the  assumption  that  the  ideal  life  is 
not  to  work  at  all  and  to  be  paid  hand- 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     115 

somely  for  not  working.  Yet  there  is  no 
more  elusive  happiness  than  the  happi- 
ness of  not  working.  He  who  takes  labor 
as  self-respecting  service  which  yields 
daily  bread  to  him  and  his  and  which 
makes  his  life  worth  something  is  happy 
in  his  work  and  wants  to  do  all  the  work 
he  can  ;  he  who  takes  it  as  a  necessary 
evil  is  never  happy  in  or  out  of  it  and  is 
of  small  use  in  the  world  :  — 

"  He  is  a  swinward,  but  I  think 
No  swinward  of  the  best ; 
For  much  he  recketh  of  his  swink 
And  carketh  for  his  rest." 

The  college  man  or  woman  should  learn 
that  in  an  earnest  world  no  loafer  counts. 
One  of  the  most  industrious  and  use- 
ful men  I  know  has  had  no  fixed  occu- 
pation ;  but  he  wastes  less  time  than 
most  professional  men,  and  much  less 
than  most  so-called  laboring  men.  "  It 
is  only  the  laboring  classes,"  some  one 
has  said,  "  who  can  afford  an  eight-hour 
day."  He  who  goes  to  his  work  with  the 


ii6    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

right  spirit  will  soon  find  more  work. 
His  usefulness  makes  him  known ;  and 
he  is  unexpectedly  called  on  for  many 
kinds  of  service.  "  That 's  a  good  man," 
says  Hawkins  of  Scott  in  Mr.  Kipling's 
"  William  the  Conqueror."  "  If  all  goes 
well,  I  shall  work  him  hard."  "This," 
the  author  adds,  "was  Jim  Hawkins's 
notion  of  the  highest  compliment  one 
human  being  could  pay  another."  Not 
one  of  us  has  an  excuse  for  becoming 
what  Homer  calls  an  axOos  dpov'p^?,  a  dead 
weight  on  the  earth.  Every  college  man 
or  woman  is  in  honor  bound  to  be  not 
disobedient  to  the  heavenly  vision,  and, 
in  the  light  of  that  vision,  to  lead  a  life 
of  work. 

But  what  of  marriage  ?  It  was  of  pro- 
posed or  suggested  marriage,  you  re- 
member, that  Christian's  daughter  said 
what  I  have  quoted  —  not  of  marriage 
in  general,  but  of  marriage  with  an  alert, 
self-seeking,  unprincipled  man,  like  some 
of  the  so-called  "hustlers"  of  to-day. 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE      117 

Now  I  believe  in  marriage  with  all  my 
heart ;  and  I  believe  in  the  marriage  of 
educated  women  —  provided  they  marry 
the  right  men.  I  have  heard  it  whispered 
that  women  often  wonder  at  the  kind  of 
girls  men  marry.  "  Love  is  said  to  be 
blind,"  an  American  humorist  remarked. 
"  But,"  he  added,  "  I  know  some  fellows 
who  see  more  in  their  girls  than  ever  I 
could."  Yet  for  every  man  who  clogs 
his  soul  with  a  wife  there  must  be  sev- 
eral women  who  clog  their  souls  with 
husbands.  "It  is  astonishing,"  said  a 
friend  of  mine,  "  how  many  women  are 
willing  to  take  upon  themselves  the  sup- 
port of  inefficient  men  ; "  if  women  knew 
what  they  should  know,  it  would  be 
more  astonishing  how  many  women  and 
what  good  women  will  marry  fast  men. 
The  woman  of  to-day  should  be  shel- 
tered from  the  evil  of  the  world  by  every 
man  who  has  chivalry  in  him ;  but  the 
educated  woman  of  to-day  should  not  be 
kept  in  ignorance  of  such  evil  as  may 


ii8     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

come  close  to  her  own  life  and  the  lives 
of  her  nearest  and  dearest.  There  is 
no  excuse  for  an  education  that  suffers 
a  clean-hearted  girl  to  crown  what  she 
would  call  the  "wild"  life  of  her  lover 
with  a  halo  of  romance.  She  should  know 
just  what  such  a  life  means  before  she 
consents  to  marry  a  man  who  leads  or 
has  led  it.  The  fancied  loss  of  refine- 
ment in  her  knowing  is  nothing  to  the 
loss  of  refinement  that  may  result  from 
her  not  knowing.  I  do  not  say  that  a 
woman  is  never  justified  in  marrying 
such  a  man  ;  for  she  may  be :  I  say  that 
she  should  know  what  she  is  doing ;  that 
the  new  physical  and  mental  training  of 
women  should  not  suffer  them  to  be  in 
dark  ignorance  of  the  vital  truths  and 
the  vital  dangers  in  their  very  woman- 
hood. 

In  speaking  of  the  relation  between 
women  and  men,  I  pass  from  morals  to 
manners.  The  wonderful  femininity  of  a 
girls'  college  may  make  girls  sufficient 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     119 

unto  themselves ;  or  it  may  make  them 
overvalue  men  as  men  (a  boys'  college 
has  corresponding  dangers).  Too  often 
among  the  girls  of  to-day  the  new  and 
healthy  freedom  of  young  women  longs 
to  exercise  itself,  not  in  the  development 
of  women  as  women,  but  in  the  assimi- 
lating of  women  to  men.  This  assimilat- 
ing belongs  to  modern  life  in  general 
and  not  to  college  life  in  particular.  In 
one  of  Miss  Ferrier's  novels  a  gentleman 
walking  with  two  ladies  in  broad  day- 
light gives  an  arm  to  each.  A  genera- 
tion or  two  ago  a  gentleman  who  did 
not  offer  his  arm  to  a  lady  in  the  even- 
ing would  hardly  have  been  a  gentleman 
at  all ;  now  (I  say  it  with  regret)  a  gen- 
tleman who  does  offer  it  is  either  rustic 
or  old-fashioned.  The  girl  of  to-day  has 
more  independent  manners  and,  happily, 
has  along  with  them  a  freer  life.  She 
may  ride  a  horse  without  an  accompany- 
ing groom ;  she  may  bestride  a  horse ; 
she  may  row  and  run  and  swim  and 


120    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

take  her  part  in  a  hundred  athletic  ex- 
ercises without  being  one  whit  less  a 
woman :  but  some  things  she  had  better 
leave  to  men.  Fiercely  competitive  ath- 
letics have  their  dangers  for  men ;  but 
they  develop  manly  strength  :  for  women 
their  dangers  are  greater  ;  and  the  quali- 
ties that  they  tend  to  develop  are  not 
womanly.  Outside  of  athletics,  too,  girls 
who  imitate  men  are  prone  to  imitate 
their  inferiorities.  I  am  so  old-fashioned 
as  to  believe  that  girls  who  smoke  ciga- 
rettes are  degenerate ;  that  girls  who  use 
the  rough  language  of  men  are,  as  some 
one  has  put  it,  "  no  gentlemen ; "  and 
that  even  college  girls  who  steal  signs 
are  thieves.  I  do  not  deny  that  the  in- 
born right  of  woman  to  smoke  cigarettes 
and  steal  signs  is  equal  to  that  of  man  ; 
yet,  if  the  sexes  are  to  be  equalized,  I 
could  wish  it  were  by  the  refining  of  men 
and  not  by  the  vulgarizing  of  women. 
The  modern  girl  whose  early  manners 
are  moulded  by  "  Alice  in  Wonderland," 


wherein  everybody  flatly  contradicts 
everybody  else,  and  who,  as  she  grows 
up,  meets  constant  temptation  to  mas- 
culine inferiority,  runs  the  risk  of  losing 
that  gentleness  which  is  not  merely  one 
of  her  charms  but  one  source  of  her 
strength. 

When  a  man  whom  we  have  learned 
to  respect  tells  a  story  such  as  men  often 
tell  among  themselves,  he  is  not  quite 
the  same  man  to  us  that  he  was  before  ; 
when  women  to  whom  we  look  for  all 
that  is  pure  and  high  fall  short  of  the 
standard  we  have  believed  to  be  theirs, 
much  of  their  power  is  gone  forever.  Is 
it  just  to  expect  of  women  more  than  we 
expect  of  men?  Possibly  not  just,  but 
better  than  just.  To  hold  either  men  or 
women  responsible  for  the  moral  charac- 
ter of  all  persons  with  whom  they  deal  — 
of  all  actors,  for  example,  whom  they  see 
on  the  stage  —  would  be  worse  than  ab- 
surd ;  yet  it  is  a  constant  source  of  won- 
der to  me  what  theatrical  shows  good 


122     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

women  will  go  to,  and  will  cheerfully 
discuss  as  the  natural  amusements  of 
ladies  and  gentlemen.  So,  too,  with 
reading.  Some  women,  no  doubt,  do 
not  care  for  Browning;  and  some  are 
ashamed  to  speak  of  him  for  fear  they 
shall  be  called  pedantic:  yet  few  are 
ashamed  to  know  all  the  transient  novels 
of  the  day ;  and  some  are  chagrined  if 
they  cannot  keep  abreast  of  the  stories 
in  the  leading  magazines,  as  some  are 
troubled  if  they  do  not  know  what  is 
going  on  at  the  principal  theatres.  You 
educated  women  can  exert  a  vast  influ- 
ence on  the  reading  taste  of  the  next 
generation  —  against  vulgarity  and  un- 
scrupulousness  in  what  is  called  "  jour- 
nalism;" against  novels  and  plays  that 
tend  to  undermine  the  sacredness  of 
marriage ;  against  plays  in  which  low 
women  drilled  by  lower  men  are  the 
chief  attraction :  and  you  can  exert  this 
influence,  not  by  public  invectives  which 
advertise  and  encourage  what  they  con- 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     123 

demn,  not  by  ostentatious  virtue,  but  by 
the  quiet  abstinence  which  assumes  that 
those  whom  you  love  will  love  whatso- 
ever things  are  pure  and  lovely  and  of 
good  report ;  not  by  the  blind  innocence 
of  a  child,  but  by  the  clear-seeing,  intel- 
ligent earnestness  of  a  woman  who  ab- 
hors that  which  is  evil  and  cleaves  to  that 
which  is  good.  In  the  days  when  you 
have  to  "make  time"  for  reading,  read 
your  newspaper  to  learn  what  is  doing 
in  the  world, — not  to  learn  that  "the 
bride  [whom  you  do  not  know]  was 
charmingly  gowned  in  white  satin,"  or 
that  the  divorced  wife  of  some  second- 
rate  actor  is  expected  to  marry  a  Wall 
Street  broker,  or  that  the  police  have 
unearthed  a  new  witness  in  the  trial  of 
Pietro  Mazzi  for  the  murder  of  his  rival. 
There  is  much  wisdom  in  that  observa- 
tion of  Thoreau's :  "  If  we  read  of  one 
man  robbed,  or  murdered,  or  killed  by 
accident,  or  one  house  burned,  or  one 
vessel  wrecked,  or  one  steamboat  blown 


124     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

up,  or  one  cow  run  over  on  the  Western 
Railroad,  or  one  mad  dog  killed,  or  one 
lot  of  grasshoppers  in  the  winter  — 
we  never  need  read  of  another.  One 
is  enough.  If  you  are  acquainted  with 
the  principle,  what  do  you  care  for  a 
myriad  instances  and  applications  ?  " 

"  To  read  well,"  says  the  same  philo- 
sopher, "  that  is,  to  read  true  books  in 
a  true  spirit,  is  a  noble  exercise  and  one 
that  will  task  the  reader  more  than  any 
exercise  which  the  customs  of  the  day 
esteem.  It  requires  a  training  such  as 
the  athletes  underwent."  Keep  in  train- 
ing ;  read  daily  if  you  can  —  and  you 
nearly  always  can  —  a  little  of  "  the  best 
that  has  been  known  and  thought  in  the 
world."  As  some  one  has  said,  adapting 
the  Scripture,  "  Keep  the  windows  open 
toward  Jerusalem."  Learn  some  things 
by  heart  for  dark  and  wakeful  hours,  and 
see  how  the  poetry  reveals  itself  more 
and  more  clearly,  till  the  obscure  is  full 
of  meaning  and  the  great  and  high  and 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     125 

simple  has  increased  its  own  meaning 
tenfold.  What  are  murder  and  millinery 
to  such  reading  as  this  ? 

Let  us  consider  for  what  the  intellec- 
tual life  of  a  girls'  college  chiefly  stands : 
not  for  the  belittling  of  those  graceful 
accomplishments  which  add  to  the  joy 
of  life,  but  for  something  solid,  to  which, 
if  time  serves,  those  accomplishments 
may  be  added  ;  not  for  what  is  called, 
almost  in  cant,  self-development,  unless 
self-development  is  to  end  in  self-forget- 
fulness ;  not  for  a  life  of  exclusive  spe- 
cialization, which  is  too  often  an  arid 
life  ;  not  for  such  a  reaction  from  over- 
femininity  as  shall  lead  to  absorption  in 
clubs  and  politics.  It  stands  for  the  de- 
velopment, in  a  woman,  of  a  clear-headed 
integrity  which,  when  supported  by  her 
intuitive  insight,  makes  her  life  the  best 
human  standard  of  right  and  wrong. 
The  untrained  woman  sometimes  amazes 
us  by  such  untruthfulness  as  would  ostra- 
cize a  man.  An  extreme  example  is  Nora 


126    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

in  Ibsen's  "  A  Doll's  House."  When  her 
husband  is  sick,  she  raises  money  to  take 
him  on  a  journey ;  and  she  raises  it  by 
forging  a  signature.  Confronted  with  the 
charge  of  crime,  she  fails  to  see  the  point : 
"  Do  you  mean  to  say  that  it  was  wrong 
to  save  my  husband's  life  ?  " 

Mr.  Meredith,  you  may  remember,  in 
"  Diana  of  the  Crossways,"  makes  his 
heroine,  who  is  betrothed  to  a  minister 
of  state  and  has  run  heavily  into  debt 
entertaining  him  and  his  friends,  sell  to 
a  newspaper  a  state  secret  he  has  given 
her  overnight.  This  instance  is  hardly 
fair,  since  those  of  us  who  have  watched 
Diana  up  to  the  fatal  moment  believe 
(we  think  we  know]  that  such  a  woman 
could  not  do  such  an  act,  and  suspect  that 
her  betrayal  of  the  Honorable  Percy  is  a 
tour  de  force  of  Mr.  Meredith,  who  needs 
somehow  to  get  the  Honorable  Percy  out 
of  the  way  and  to  clear  the  deck  for 
Tom  Redworth,  the  man  of  Mr.  Mere- 
dith's choice  ;  yet  the  mere  fact  that  this 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     127 

novelist  could  make  an  upright  and  loyal 
and  able  woman  do  through  mental  con- 
fusion an  act  in  itself  so  base  is  significant. 
Among  the  people  who  are  intellectually 
rather  than  morally  untruthful,  who  would 
tell  the  truth  if  they  saw  it  but  who  can- 
not see  it,  there  are,  I  am  afraid,  more 
women  than  men  —  women  whose  sense 
of  history  is  intuitive  and  whose  sense  of 
present  fact  is  more  emotional  than  sci- 
entific. Even  women  who  have  set  out 
to  purify  politics  have  proposed  as  mat- 
ters of  course  such  political  schemes  as 
no  honest  man  would  endure.  Now  col- 
lege training  does  not  stifle  the  emotional 
in  women ;  but  it  may  train  women  to 
see  clearly  and  to  speak  accurately.  The 
best  poet  is  no  less  a  poet  for  knowing 
how  to  write  prose  ;  and  the  best  train- 
ing of  the  mind  is  no  clog  to  the  soul. 

Girls'  colleges  were  not  created  to 
make  girls  imitate  men,  even  in  their 
minds  ;  they  were  created  to  correct  the 
weakness  and  to  strengthen  the  strength 


128     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

of  women  as  women.  In  purity  of  heart, 
in  self-forgetful  service,  in  spiritual  in- 
sight, in  nearly  all  that  is  devoted  and 
deep  and  high,  the  women  of  civilized 
countries  have  advanced  far  beyond  the 
men.  If  along  with  this  advance  there 
once  sprang  up  in  our  weaker  sisters  the 
notion  that  timidity  is  pretty,  that  inva- 
lidism  is  interesting,  and  that  uselessness 
is  a  charm,  let  us  thank  the  century  that 
has  just  closed  for  clearing  the  air.  Let 
us  thank  the  girls'  colleges  for  their  re- 
cognition of  the  claims  of  a  girl's  mind, 
for  their  strong  common  sense,  for  their 
ideals  of  womanhood.  Now  for  good  and 
now  for  evil,  the  power  of  women  is 
everywhere  in  the  land.  Half  the  bad 
things  done  by  men  are  done  under  the 
fascination  of  those  women  who  draw 
men  down  ;  nearly  all  the  good  things 
are  done  with  the  courage  that  men  get 
from  women  who  believe  in  them.  As  to 
public  life,  I  am  still  so  conservative  as  to 
hold  that  a  political  competition  of  both 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     129 

sexes  is  less  likely  to  elevate  men  than 
to  degrade  women,  and  that  the  peculiar 
strength  of  refined  and  earnest  woman- 
hood is  exercised  in  ways  less  public. 
I  fear  the  loss  of  the  best  that  is  in  wo- 
man —  and,  with  it,  the  loss  of  a  power 
that  is  hers  and  hers  alone. 

I  have  spoken  too  much  of  what  wo- 
men should  not  do  and  have  said  little 
of  what  they  can  do  —  of  what  they  must 
do  if  they  are  to  fulfil  the  high  possibili- 
ties of  their  lives.  If  I  have  rushed  in 
where  angels  fear  to  tread,  I  have  done 
it  as  one  who  loves  and  reverences  good 
women  beyond  all  else  on  earth.  As  sis- 
ters, as  wives,  as  mothers,  as  friends,  as 
helpers  to  all  that  is  noble,  you  the  edu- 
cated women  of  this  generation  have  a 
responsibility  and  an  influence  that  should 
make  you  at  once  happy  and  grave  — 
happy  because  of  the  limitless  power  for 
good  that  comes  of  doing  day  by  day 
what  must  be  done,  and  of  seeing,  even 
in  the  drudgery  of  it,  "a  light  that  never 


130     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

was  on  sea  or  land  ; "  grave,  lest  in 
times  of  human  weakness,  you  may  turn 
from  the  light  and  may  see  only  a  sad 
and  dull  routine  in  a  world  of  darkness 
and  sorrow.  In  these  hours,  which  may 
be  only  the  reactionary  consequence  of 
the  best  work  you  have  ever  done  —  the 
nervous  depression  that  follows  nervous 
exaltation  —  learn  to  say  with  the  old 
philosopher,  "This  too  shall  pass,"  and 
learn  to  look,  even  at  your  own  weari- 
ness, with  the  eyes  of  a  poet.  For  I  still 
believe  that,  though  few  women  have 
been  great  poets,  it  is  part  of  a  woman's 
mission  to  put  poetry  into  life. 

Going  back  to  the  rose  and  the  cab- 
bage, I  may  say  that  the  college  woman's 
business  is  not  to  scorn  the  cabbage  but 
to  invest  it  with  a  rose  motive,  to  see  the 
light  that  kindles  the  commonplace  into 
everlasting  truth.  People  talk  a  good 
deal  about  loss  of  dignity;  but  the  one 
sure  way  of  losing  dignity  is  through 
constant  fear  of  losing  it  I  like  that 


AT  WELLESLEY  COLLEGE     131 

story  of  President  Roosevelt  which  says 
that,  as  he  travelled  by  coach  from  his 
sister's  country  place  to  the  Yale  Bicen- 
tennial Celebration,  he  left  the  carriage 
and  walked  a  while  for  exercise ;  and,  as 
he  walked,  he  saw  a  farmer  vainly  trying 
to  get  his  cows  in  ;  and  he  sprang  over 
the  wall,  drove  the  cows  to  the  farmer, 
and  ran  back.  The  story,  I  fear,  is  ficti- 
tious ;  but  that  people  should  believe  it, 
is  to  the  President's  honor.  His  notion 
of  dignity  is  his  own  and  might  not  do 
for  everybody;  nor  would  some  other 
man's  dignity  make  up  in  him  for  the 
loss  of  that  informal  and  vigorous  natu- 
ralness which  endears  him  to  all  who 
know  him  and  to  thousands,  to  millions, 
who  do  not. 

The  college  graduate  who,  as  such,  is 
too  fastidious  for  any  honest,  helpful  work 
has  missed  one  of  the  best  things  that 
either  college  or  Christianity  can  teach. 
Among  the  many  sentences  that  stand 
by  you  in  Mr.  Kipling's  "  William  the 


132    COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

Conqueror,"  that  wonderful  story  to 
which  I  have  already  referred,  is  Haw- 
kins's remark  when  he  is  reproached  for 
the  kind  of  work  he  is  giving  Scott. 

"  He 's  not  a  coolie,"  says  the  heroine 
wrathfully ;  "  he  ought  to  be  doing  his 
regulation  work." 

"  He 's  the  best  man  in  the  service," 
Hawkins  answers,  "  and  that 's  saying  a 
good  deal ;  but  if  you  must  use  razors 
to  cut  grindstones,  why,  I  prefer  the  best 
cutlery." 

Every  day  of  our  lives  we  see  fine  steel 
put  to  coarse  uses ;  and  sometimes  we 
rebel  at  a  world  where  such  things  can 
and  must  go  on.  We  see  quiveringly 
delicate  lives  dashing  themselves,  as  it 
seems,  against  hard,  unyielding  wicked- 
ness ;  and  we  cry  out  at  the  wrong.  We 
forget  that  it  is  sensitive  men  and  women 
who  can  do  the  best  work  among  men 
and  women,  because  they  and  they  only 
can  understand  hearts  unlike  their  own ; 
because  they  and  they  only  can  see  the 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     133 

glory  of  the  forbidding  task.  Even  the 
same  quality  that  without  training  makes 
them  lose  their  heads  enables  them  with 
training  to  walk  steadily  on  the  brink  of 
precipices;  the  same  quick  apprehen- 
siveness  that  makes  them  timid  becomes, 
under  control,  a  minister  to  the  highest 
courage,  enabling  shrinking  women  to 
face  death,  and  what  is  infinitely  worse 
than  death  —  apparently  hopeless  life. 
The  poet  Crashaw  remembering  the 
Christian  martyrs  cries,  — 

"  Oh  that  it  were  as  it  was  wont  to  be 
When  Thy  old  friends  of  fire,  all  full  of  Thee, 
Fought  against  frowns  with  smiles,  gave  glorious 

chase 

To  persecutions,  and  against  the  face 
Of  death  and  fiercest  dangers,  durst  with  brave 
And  sober  pace  march  on  to  meet  a  grave. 
On  their  bold  breasts  about  the  world  they  bore 

Thee, 
And  to  the  teeth   of  hell   stood  up  to   teach 

Thee ; 

In  centre  of  their  inmost  souls  they  wore  Thee, 
Where  racks   and  torments  strived  in  vain  to 

reach  Thee." 


134     COMMENCEMENT  ADDRESS 

Even  in  our  own  days  we  have  seen  a 
spirit  as  fine  and  high  among  educated 
men  and  women.  As  a  child,  I  saw  Gov- 
ernor Andrew  review  on  Boston  Com- 
mon the  Fifty-fourth  Massachusetts,  the 
first  black  regiment,  whose  white  com- 
mander, scarcely  more  than  a  boy,  Colo- 
nel Robert  Gould  Shaw,  lives  to-day  in 
the  hearts  of  Harvard  men  as  the  very 
flower  of  American  knighthood,  as  the 
symbol  of  high  idealism,  of  romantic 
loyalty  to  college  and  to  country.  Just 
before  the  assault  on  Fort  Wagner,  a 
man  who  believes  himself  to  be  the  last 
white  man  that  ever  talked  with  Robert 
Shaw,  carried  him  a  message : a  — 

"  General  Strong  presents  his  compli- 
ments to  Colonel  Shaw  and  tells  him 
that  he  expects  the  Fifty-fourth  to  do  its 
duty." 

"  Tell  General  Strong,"  was  the  an- 

1  This  story  is  told  by  President  Thwing  of 
Western  Reserve  University,  who  heard  it  from 
the  messenger. 


AT  WELLESLEY   COLLEGE     135 

swer,  "  that  the  Fifty-fourth  will  immor- 
talize itself "  —  "  and,"  says  the  soldier 
who  took  the  message,  "  in  half  an  hour 
he  was  among  the  immortals." 

"What  has  it  all  been  for?"  For  the 
knowledge  that  makes  life  richer;  for 
the  friendship  that  makes  life  sweeter ; 
for  the  training  that  brings  power  to  the 
task  which  is  hard  and  high ;  for  the 
wisdom  that  suffers  and  triumphs  and 
is  strong ;  for  the  vision  that  shall  light 
your  way  like  a  pillar  of  fire ;  for  the 
truth  that  shall  make  you  free. 


DISCIPLINE   IN   SCHOOL 
AND   COLLEGE 


DISCIPLINE  IN  SCHOOL  AND 
COLLEGE 

A  PAPER  WRITTEN  FOR  THE  CONTEM- 
PORARY CLUB  OF  ST.   LOUIS 

NOTHING  makes  me  feel  older  than  the 
recollection  that  I  was  brought  up  in 
the  days  of  corporal  punishment  at  New 
England  public  schools.  Even  now,  there 
are,  no  doubt,  district  schools  wherein 
questions  of  discipline  must  be  settled 
by  a  fight  in  which  the  best  man  wins. 
Sometimes  the  best  man  is  the  teacher, 
sometimes  a  pupil ;  and,  if  the  pupil 
wins,  the  teacher  goes.  Recently  a  young 
woman  from  Radcliffe  College  taught  a 
school  in  which  she  was  obliged  to  flog 
boys  so  large  that  nothing  but  gallantry 
on  their  part  enabled  her  to  do  it.  Such 
cases,  however,  are  remote  and  rural. 


140  DISCIPLINE   IN 

They  belong  to  peaceful  country  life,  and 
are  not  deliberately  contemplated  as  part 
of  a  school  system  in  thickly  settled  and 
civilized  regions.  Yet  I  have  seen  in  a 
New  England  grammar  school  the  mas- 
ter struggling  with  a  boy,  a  settee  broken 
in  the  struggle,  master  and  boy,  pur- 
suer and  pursued,  dashing  wildly  through 
the  school  room,  a  scene  of  wrath  and 
danger  ;  and  I  remember  when  thirty  or 
forty  years  ago  the  people  of  Cambridge 
were  so  excited  by  a  severe  case  of  cor- 
poral punishment  that  they  hastened  the 
end  of  all  corporal  punishment  in  the 
public  schools.  Nor  must  these  specific 
cases  be  regarded  as  evidence  that  the 
masters  were  brutal :  in  the  second  case, 
the  master  was  acknowledged  as  one  of 
the  best  in  the  city ;  in  the  first,  he  was 
a  man  whom,  after  all  these  years,  I  still 
regard  as  one  of  the  best  teachers  I 
have  ever  known  and  one  of  the  kindest. 
These  men  were  part  of  a  system  which 
we  have  happily  outgrown ;  and  in  at 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE    141 

least  one  of  them  was  an  unusual  share 
of  that  very  relation  towards  pupils 
which  has  helped  us  outgrow  it.  His 
predecessor,  a  wonderfully  popular  and 
kind-hearted  teacher,  had  a  favorite  pun- 
ishment which  he  called  "driving  the 
nail."  When  a  number  of  boys  were 
troublesome  in  any  way,  —  when,  for  in- 
stance, they  failed  badly  in  their  lessons, 
—  he  stood  them  on  a  platform  and 
made  them  bend  over  in  a  row,  each 
touching  the  floor  with  one  finger.  He 
then  walked  the  rounds  behind  them, 
applying  the  ruler.  In  the  same  city,  a 
good  Harvard  man  who  kept  a  private 
school  used  to  flog  with  the  ruler  the 
hands  of  the  boys  whose  fathers  paid 
him.  Some  of  these  boys  were  the  most 
aristocratic  in  a  fine  old  New  England 
city.  One,  whom  I  have  seen  writhing 
under  the  ruler,  has  since  sent  his  own 
boy  to  Groton,  where  the  whole  theory 
of  discipline  is  intensely  modern. 

Now,  just  as  in  outgrowing  the  old 


142  DISCIPLINE   IN 

harshness  of  compulsory  education  we 
have  sometimes  made  school  work  too 
easy,  so  in  outgrowing  corporal  punish- 
ment we  have  sometimes  made  school 
discipline  too  slack.  Mr.  Dooley,  you 
remember,  describes  a  scene  at  a  Kin- 
dergarten in  which  one  child  is  pulling 
another's  hair,  while  the  teacher  observes 
that  the  child  whose  hair  is  pulled  is 
learning  patience,  and  the  child  who  is 
pulling  the  hair  is  discovering  the  futility 
of  human  endeavor.  There  is,  however, 
a  reasonable  theory  somewhere  ;  and,  at 
the  risk  of  being  commonplace,  I  am  go- 
ing to  say  what  seems  reasonable  to  me, 
and  what,  so  far  as  my  experience  goes, 
has  brought  the  best  result.  No  school 
or  college  discipline  can  be  perfect ;  but 
school  and  college  discipline  become 
more  nearly  perfect  according  as  the 
teachers  possess,  beside  strong  character, 
unquestioned  sympathy  with  young  peo- 
ple and  unquestioned  integrity.  When  I 
say  "  unquestioned,"  I  imply  tact,  cour- 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE     143 

tesy,  and  possibly  humor  ;  for  without  at 
least  the  first  of  these  qualities  no  sym- 
pathy can  be  unquestioned,  and  without 
the  others  some  sympathy  misses  fire. 
Tact,  courtesy,  and  a  sense  of  humor 
are  in  most  of  us  intermittent,  and  hence 
some  of  our  failures.  Men  may  be  able, 
upright,  and  genuinely  sympathetic,  yet 
quite  unable  to  make  young  people  know 
their  sympathy  or  even  feel  their  upright- 
ness, except  on  long  acquaintance.  Such 
men  are,  among  young  people,  ineffec- 
tive. A  just  teacher  may  be  hated  and 
an  unjust  teacher  loved,  if  the  just  man 
cannot  show  sympathy  at  short  notice 
and  the  unjust  man  cannot  help  show- 
ing it. 

The  foundation  of  school  discipline 
should  be  laid  by  parents;  for  they  can 
best  lead  children  to  expect  sympathy 
and  straightforwardness  in  older  peo- 
ple. One  of  the  surprises  to  a  disciplin- 
ary officer  in  a  school  or  a  college  is 
the  want  of  confidence  between  many 


144  DISCIPLINE   IN 

boys  and  their  parents.  Instead  of  being 
the  first  persons  to  whom  boys  turn 
in  times  of  trouble,  parents  are  fre- 
quently the  last,  — not  necessarily  be- 
cause they  are  unjust  or  cold-hearted 
(they  may  be  quite  the  reverse)  but 
because  they  have  never  succeeded  in 
showing  their  children  that  kind  of  sym- 
pathy to  which  a  son  naturally  turns.  No 
one  who  deals  with  boys  at  school  or 
college  can  fail  to  see  how  much  should 
be  forgiven  to  those  boys  whose  fathers 
have  never  stood  toward  them  in  a  rela- 
tion of  straightforward  affection. 

In  teachers  of  boys  ready  sympathy 
and  absolute  straightforwardness  are  so 
important,  that  I,  for  one,  place  them 
above  high  scholarship.  That  brilliant 
writer,  Professor  Miinsterberg,  justly  de- 
plores the  lack  of  learning  in  American 
teachers.  If  all  learned  men  had  the 
vigor  and  the  magnetism  of  Professor 
Miinsterberg,  his  complaint  would  have 
even  more  weight  than  it  has  now.  The 


SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE      145 

difficulty  is  that,  though  no  teacher  can 
have  learned  too  much,  yet,  the  love  of 
learning  may  unfit  a  man  to  be  a  teacher 
of  boys.  A  scholar  who  becomes  ab- 
sorbed in  a  scholar's  life  may  lose  pa- 
tience with  immature  minds ;  and  his 
naturally  human  feeling  toward  men  may 
be  weakened  by  his  interest  in  books.  In 
human  relations  he  may  fail  to  rub  off 
what  Dryden  would  call  the  "rust  that 
he  contracted  while  laying  in  his  stock 
of  learning,"  and  may  take  his  Doctor's 
degree  remote  from  men  and  still  more 
remote  from  boys.  The  modern  school- 
master's work  is  vastly  more  than  having 
or  even  imparting  knowledge.  It  pene- 
trates and  compasses  the  boy's  whole 
living  ;  it  cannot  be  done  without  enthu- 
siastic drudgery  in  small  and  unlearned 
things,  without  a  devotion  to  common- 
place details,  such  as  characterizes  a 
good  mother's  care  of  a  young  child, 
without  what  a  man  of  remote  learning 
regards  as  wasting  time,  without  a  de- 


146  DISCIPLINE   IN 

liberate  putting  into  the  background  of 
what  people  call  the  development  and 
expansion  of  one's  own  self.  "  I  want," 
young  teachers  write,  "  a  larger  field  for 
my  own  growth  and  my  own  career." 
Yet  often,  as  Dr.  Holmes  would  say,  in 
the  place  they  already  occupy  they  "  rat- 
tle round  ; "  they  fail  to  know  their  far- 
reaching  power  where  they  are  for  good 
or  for  evil,  and  to  know  that  out  of  the 
very  things  they  are  shirking  now  come 
the  growth  and  the  career.  As  I  see 
every  year  the  number  of  Doctors  of 
Philosophy  who  are  let  loose  upon  the 
world,  and  as  I  know  that  there  are  not 
nearly  enough  college  places  for  them 
all,  I  fear  that  the  time  will  come  when 
we  shall  be  in  danger  not  of  over- 
educated  but  of  over -learned  school- 
masters, when  we  shall  overestimate  the 
higher  learning  in  the  men  who  teach 
our  boys.  The  influence  of  a  schoolmas- 
ter for  good  or  for  evil  cannot  be  escaped. 
The  more  learning  the  better,  if  in  his 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE     147 

learning  a  man  remains  sweet  and  sound  ; 
but  a  schoolmaster  who  does  his  work 
grudgingly,  and  who  feels  himself  above 
it,  is  an  unmistakable  influence  for  the 
bad.  It  is  of  vital  importance  what  sort 
of  men  our  schoolmasters  are.  Many 
of  our  boarding  schools  —  and  board- 
ing schools  of  high  grade  —  suffer  con- 
stantly from  the  employment  of  low-paid 
younger  masters,  who  if  they  succeed 
go  elsewhere,  and  if  they  fail  ought  to  go 
elsewhere.  Yet,  when  I  say  "  low-paid," 
I  do  not  imply  that  a  teacher  should  do 
his  work  for  money.  The  schoolmaster 
who  works  for  money  —  whatever  his 
salary  —  the  schoolmaster  who  forgets 
what  it  is  to  be  a  boy,  the  schoolmaster 
who  constantly  regrets  that  he  is  a  school- 
master and  laments  his  own  thwarted 
career,  is  unfit  for  his  work.  This  truth 
is  now  recognized  in  our  best  private 
schools.  Again  and  again,  these  schools 
reject  a  scholar  for  a  man  who  knows  not 
half  so  much,  but  who  seems  a  man,  — 


148  DISCIPLINE   IN 

an  invigorating  influence  among  boys, 
an  influence  toward  the  spirit  of  leader- 
ship. 

In  one  of  our  best  schools  for  boys 
the  older  and  stronger  pupils  are  called 
"prefects,"  and  are  put  in  positions  of 
responsibility  which  bring  them  into 
close  relation  with  the  masters.  They  do 
not  govern  the  school  ;  they  are  subject 
to  the  masters  :  but  they  are  consulted  by 
the  masters  as  best  representing  the  state 
of  mind  of  the  boys  in  general,  and  as 
best  interpreting  to  the  boys  in  general 
the  state  of  mind  of  the  masters.  They 
are  the  maturest  boys  ;  and  in  their  re- 
sponsibility they  increase  their  maturity. 
As  a  result,  the  school  best  known  for  its 
prefect  system  sends  to  Harvard  College, 
nearly  every  year,  at  least  one  youth  who 
stands  out  in  his  larger  surroundings  as 
a  leader.  In  one  year  three  of  the  class 
presidents  in  Harvard  College  were  from 
that  school,  which  sends  us  not  more 
than  about  fifteen  boys  a  year ;  and  they 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      149 

were  presidents  of  classes  in  which  five 
or  six  hundred  young  fellows  had  the 
right  to  vote  for  class  officers.  Moreover, 
many  boys  from  this  school  keep  in  col- 
lege the  attitude  of  the  prefect,  the  re- 
cognition that  the  main  object  of  student 
and  college  officer  is  one  and  the  same, 
—  to  do  the  best  that  can  be  done  for 
every  student  who  comes  to  the  Univer- 
sity; to  keep  him  if  he  can  be  made  worth 
keeping,  and  otherwise,  for  the  good  of 
the  place  and  for  his  own  good,  to  send 
him  away,  though  seldom  or  never  with- 
out a  hope  of  coming  back.  This  coop- 
eration between  scholar  and  master,  be- 
tween student  and  professor,  is  the  most 
striking  characteristic  of  modern  school 
and  college  discipline.  It  is  not  what  is 
called  "  student  government ;  "  but  it  is 
better  than  student  government.  So  far 
as  my  experience  goes,  the  government 
of  a  university,  or  of  any  large  part  of 
a  university,  cannot  with  safety  be  en- 
trusted to  students  ;  they  are  harsher 


150  DISCIPLINE   IN 

than  their  elders,  and  less  just  to  persons 
that  they  dislike.  Nor  do  the  students 
themselves  seriously  wish  for  such  re- 
sponsibility and  power.  In  their  own 
enterprises,  their  athletics  and  athletic 
management,  their  newspapers,  their  so- 
cial and  debating  societies,  —  in  a  hun- 
dred things,  —  they  may  develop  their 
leadership  and  their  administrative  ca- 
pacity. In  the  conduct  of  the  university 
they  should,  I  believe,  have  great  weight 
with  the  administrative  officers  and  have 
their  confidence,  but  not  themselves  be 
administrative  officers. 

When  I  say  they  should  have  the  con- 
fidence of  the  administrative  officers,  I 
mean  that  these  officers  should  so  far 
believe  in  them  as  not  merely  to  ask 
their  opinions,  but  to  speak  out  their  own 
opinions,  and  lay  open  to  the  best  of  the 
students  whatever  can  honestly  be  laid 
open  to  them ;  that  the  officers  should 
not  hesitate  to  explain  fully  the  reason 
for  this  or  that  act,  relying  on  their  own 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE      151 

sincerity  and  openness,  on  the  good  will 
of  the  majority,  on  the  hearty  coopera- 
tion of  student  leaders,  and,  through  stu- 
dent leaders,  of  the  student  body.  This 
good  will  and  cooperation  cannot  be 
counted  on  unless  the  officers  have  the 
qualities  I  have  already  mentioned,  — 
sympathy  with  youth,  and  straightfor- 
wardness in  all  their  dealings.  I  remem- 
ber one  large  school  at  which  the  desks 
in  the  rooms  for  study  were  turned  away 
from  the  platform,  so  that  the  master 
might  better  watch  the  boys,  while  they 
could  not  watch  him  without  turning 
their  heads  and  showing  him  that  they 
were  watching  him.  What  can  be  ex- 
pected of  boys  who  are  avowedly  dis- 
trusted ?  In  an  open  fight  the  best  man 
may  be  the  master ;  but  in  strategy  the 
boys  nearly  always  win. 

To  illustrate  the  spirit  of  the  prefects, 
I  may  recall  a  few  things  that  have  hap- 
pened in  Harvard  College.  A  student 
had  expressed  to  me  some  disgust  at 


152  DISCIPLINE   IN 

the  election  of  his  class  president  —  who 
had  been  a  prefect  —  on  the  ground  that 
the  man  was  not  a  natural  president ; 
that,  though  he  was  a  good  football 
player,  he  was  a  poor  hand  at  the  con- 
duct of  a  class  meeting,  and  had  little 
skill  in  speech.  A  day  or  two  later  the 
same  student  said  :  "  I  have  changed  my 
mind  about  X.  When  one  of  the  fellows 
from  his  school  was  drunk  in  the  street 
to-day,  and  the  crowd  had  got  about  him 
and  were  guying  him,  X  came  round  and 
tried  to  get  him  home.  When  he  refused 
to  go,  X  calmly  picked  him  up  and  car- 
ried him  through  the  street  to  the  dor- 
mitory." Note  the  incidental  advantage 
in  having  an  athlete  for  a  class  presi- 
dent. 

Another  man  from  this  school  came  to 
me  one  day  about  a  clever  loafer,  whose 
habits  were  unsteady,  and  whom  the  col- 
lege authorities  had  given  up  as  a  bad 
job.  Instead  of  saying,  as  the  conven- 
tional student  of  twenty  years  ago  would 


SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE      153 

have  said,  that  the  man  in  question  was 
a  brilliant  and  fine  fellow,  sadly  misun- 
derstood by  the  college  authorities,  he 
began  thus :  "  I  am  perfectly  disgusted 
with  him.  I  never  thought  he  ought  to 
be  here ;  but  Y  has  offered  to  take  him 
into  his  room  and  make  him  work,  while 
he  is  working  at  the  law  eight  hours  a 
day :  and  I  think  it  is  a  pretty  darned 
good  thing  in  Y  ;  and  I  wish  you  would 
let  him  try  it."  I  remember  also  a  stu- 
dent whom  I  called  to  my  office  for  a 
poor  record  in  his  studies,  and  who 
showed  incidentally  by  his  appearance 
and  bearing  that  the  radical  trouble  was 
in  his  way  of  life.  The  best  man  I  could 
think  of —  far  better  than  any  college  pro- 
fessor —  to  take  hold  of  him  was  a  Senior 
who  had  been  a  prefect,  and  who,  through 
his  ability  as  an  athlete  and  through  the 
general  steadiness  and  helpfulness  of  his 
character,  was  admired  by  everybody  in 
the  College.  He  had  no  reason  to  be 
especially  interested  in  the  fellow  I  had 


154  DISCIPLINE   IN 

just  seen  —  and  certainly  he  had  enough 
to  do :  but  I  knew  that  the  best  students 
and  the  best  men  everywhere  were  al- 
ways ready  to  do  more ;  and  I  asked 
him  to  take  this  boy  in  hand.  "  I  don't 
know  that  I  can  make  him  work,"  he 
said  ;  "  there  is  not  much  to  him."  "  The 
main  trouble  is,"  said  I,  "  that  he  is  liv- 
ing wrong."  "  O,  we  '11  stop  that,"  he 
said ;  and  the  boy  so  far  recovered  as  to 
finish  his  work  without  discredit,  and  to 
win  his  degree. 

This  responsibility  of  the  stronger  stu- 
dents for  the  weaker  is  a  common  result 
of  the  prefect  system,  but  is  not  confined 
to  this  system.  A  student  from  a  school 
where  there  are  no  prefects  came  to  me 
one  day  in  behalf  of  a  fellow  whom  the 
administrative  board  of  the  College  was 
sending  away  because  he  would  network. 
"  I  wish,"  said  the  student,  "  you  would 
let  me  see  whether  I  can  do  something 
with  him.  I  think  I  can  make  him  work." 
The  administrative  board  told  him  to  try. 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      155 

He  made  that  fellow  work  as  no  teacher 
or  combination  of  teachers  could  have 
done ;  and  he  brought  him  through  the 
year  with  success.  Moreover,  he  created 
in  him  such  gratitude  and  loyalty  as  I 
have  seldom  known  in  one  young  man 
toward  another. 

Some  time  ago  several  students  dis- 
appeared ;  and  it  was  necessary,  not  for 
disciplinary  reasons,  but  for  human  rea- 
sons, to  find  them.  How  to  find  them 
was  altogether  too  much  for  me ;  and 
accordingly  I  went  in  the  evening  to  this 
same  man  of  whom  I  have  just  spoken. 
He  was  a  leader  among  his  fellows  and 
a  good  scholar  also,  and  was  now,  in  his 
fourth  year,  working  for  the  degree  of 
A.  M.  I  found  him  studying  for  a  final 
examination  the  next  day ;  and  the  day 
after  that  he  was  to  have  another  final 
examination.  His  academic  year  had 
been  badly  broken  both  by  athletics  and 
by  affairs  at  home ;  and  those  examina- 
tions were  peculiarly  important,  because 


156  DISCIPLINE   IN 

for  the  Master's  degree  high  marks  are 
required.  He  told  me  at  once  where  he 
thought  the  lost  men,  if  they  were  knock- 
ing about  the  city,  were  likely  to  be  found, 
to  what  theatres  they  might  go,  and  to 
what  restaurants ;  and,  without  a  word 
about  his  work,  he  said,  "  I  will  go  to 
Boston  with  you  now."  When  I  would 
not  hear  of  that,  he  said,  "  If  you  want 
me,  telephone  out.  Meantime  I  shall  be 
working  here.  I  shall  be  up  grinding 
until  about  three  o'clock ;  I  will  go  over 
to  the  Institute  building  before  I  go  to 
bed  ;  and  if  I  can  get  any  news  of  them 
there,  I  will  look  out  for  them." 

Of  the  three  men  whose  help  I  have 
just  recounted,  two  were  class  presidents 
and  first  marshals  ;  the  other  was  second 
marshal  in  the  same  class  with  one  of 
the  two.  Now  when  men  who  are  elected 
by  their  fellow  students  to  the  highest 
class  offices  feel  as  these  men  felt,  there 
is  great  hope  for  the  discipline  of  the  Col- 
lege. Half  the  problem,  indeed,  is  solved. 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE     157 

Not  long  ago  I  had  another  extraor- 
dinary instance  of  this  sort  of  responsi- 
bility among  students,  —  more  extraor- 
dinary than  any  I  have  named  because 
the  person  who  felt  it  must  have  been 
younger  than  the  person  toward  whom 
he  felt  it.  The  latter,  however,  was  with- 
out experience,  and  seemed  to  need  pro- 
tection from  an  adventuress  who  was 
ruining  his  life. 

When  I  say  that  college  officers  should 
sympathize  with  youth,  I  do  not  mean 
that  they  should  sympathize  with  juve- 
nility, though  they  should  understand  it ; 
I  mean  that  they  should  know  and  feel 
the  peculiar  strain  to  which  students  are 
subjected.  I  have  heard  men  speak  lightly 
of  college  temptation.  "The  truth  is," 
they  say,  "  there  is  no  place  in  the  world 
where  temptation  to  evil  is  so  slight 
as  in  college,  because  there  is  no  place 
in  the  world  where  temptation  to  ex- 
cellence is  so  strong."  It  is  true  that 
temptation  to  excellence  is  strong,  that 


158  DISCIPLINE  IN 

there  is  no  place  in  the  world  where 
higher  ideals  are  set  before  young  men, 
or  where  there  are  more  forces  which,  by 
interesting  them  in  good  things,  may 
drive  out  bad  ones ;  but  it  is  also  true, 
and  must  be  constantly  borne  in  mind, 
that  the  step  from  school  to  college  or 
from  home  to  college  is  often  the  first 
step  into  the  world.  In  a  large  collegiate 
school,  such  as  Exeter  or  Andover,  the 
boys  get  the  same  kind  of  temptation 
and  the  same  kind  of  discipline  that 
other  boys  get  in  college  ;  but  for  most 
boys  college  has  —  in  the  beginning,  at 
any  rate  —  certain  peculiar  temptations. 
Wherever  hundreds  orthousandsof  young 
men  are  together,  with  their  first  responsi- 
bility for  money,  and  in  their  first  entrance 
to  the  world,  vice  is  almost  thrown  at 
them.  In  a  modern  college,  moreover, 
a  student  has  much  more  freedom  as 
to  his  time  in  general,  and  his  evenings 
in  particular,  than  at  home  or  at  school ; 
and  the  remoteness  of  the  work  which 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE     159 

by  and  by  he  must  do  in  the  world, 
and  the  uncertainty  what  it  is  to  be, 
may  prevent  him  from  seeing  the  rela- 
tion between  industry  now  and  success 
in  later  life.  A  boy  who  goes  into  an 
office  may  have  his  evenings  free,  and 
may  have  all  sorts  of  temptations ;  but 
he  must  go  to  a  certain  place  at  a  certain 
time  —  and  at  a  pretty  early  time  in  the 
morning  —  or  something  happens.  By 
evening  his  work  may  have  made  him 
healthily  tired ;  and  he  knows  that  his 
advancement  in  business  —  and  perhaps 
his  whole  career  —  will  depend  on  the 
faithfulness  and  the  eagerness  with  which 
he  does  the  work  immediately  before 
him.  All  this  the  ordinary  college  boy 
does  not  see.  He  is  bewildered,  even  by 
the  good  opportunities  which  are  set  be- 
fore him,  not  one  tenth  part  of  which  he 
has  time  to  use.  Now  this  bewilderment 
demands  in  the  college  officers  who  meet 
him  no  end  of  sympathy,  along  with  a 
certain  sternness  of  resolution. 


160  DISCIPLINE   IN 

I  have  spoken  of  the  larger  side  of 
discipline.  Noise  in  dormitories,  and 
pranks  too  puerile  for  college  students, 
should  seldom  be  treated  as  grave  of- 
fences. If  possible,  a  student  should  be 
taught  to  see  their  puerility.  Now  and 
then,  discipline  may  require  the  removal 
of  a  youth  prominently  engaged  in  them ; 
but  a  sharp  line  should  be  drawn  be- 
tween such  offences  and  dishonesty  or 
vice  or  persistent  loafing,  or  what  Pro- 
fessor Shaler  has  called  "miscellaneous 
worthlessness." 

In  all  relations  with  students  school 
and  college  officers  should,  as  I  have  im- 
plied, be  as  open  as  they  can  be  without 
violating  the  confidence  of  other  men. 
In  particular,  no  school  or  college  officer 
should  refuse  to  be  open  from  the  notion 
that  openness  means  loss  of  dignity. 
Dignity  is  most  easily  lost  by  him  who 
thinks  too  much  about  it;  nor  is  the 
dignity  of  any  two  men  alike.  President 
Eliot's,  for  example,  differs  materially 


SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE      161 

from  President  Roosevelt's ;  and  we  can 
hardly  imagine  their  swapping :  but  each 
of  these  gentlemen  has  in  his  own  way 
extraordinary  power  over  men.  In  one 
important  school  the  headmaster,  a  man 
of  forty  or  more,  is  the  right  fielder  of 
the  baseball  team ;  and  the  masters,  in 
general,  are  intimate  friends  and  play- 
mates of  the  boys,  who  do  not  hesitate 
in  play  hours  to  call  them  by  nicknames 
to  their  faces.  This  state  of  things  would 
not  do  for  every  school ;  yet  I  know  no 
school  whose  pupils  come  to  college  with 
more  courteous  manners.  Again,  it  is 
never  in  any  school  or  college  undigni- 
fied for  a  teacher  to  explain  any  act  of 
his  that  for  a  boy  seems  to  need  explana- 
tion. If  in  his  explanation  he  reaches  a 
point  where  he  must  betray  other  people 
or  stop,  he  need  only  say,  "  I  am  sorry, 
but  I  have  no  right  to  go  further."  Again, 
it  is  never  undignified  for  a  teacher  to 
say  in  the  class-room,  "  I  do  not  know ; " 
and  many  a  teacher  loses  the  respect  of 


162  DISCIPLINE  IN 

his  pupils  from  unwillingness  to  admit 
that  he  is  fallible. 

The  cultivation  of  openness  on  both 
sides  is  closely  connected  with  what 
seems  the  slowness  of  some  reforms  in 
our  larger  colleges.  A  slow  reform  is 
much  better  than  an  evaded  or  violated 
prohibition ;  and  the  choice  is  often  be- 
tween these  two.  The  policy  of  Harvard 
University,  for  example,  is  to  test  every- 
thing by  daylight.  Instead  of  forbidding 
certain  initiation  practices,  which  it  be- 
lieves to  be  foolish  and  occasionally 
cruel,  but  which  it  knows  no  power  could 
stop  if  the  societies  were  secret  societies, 
it  does  all  it  can  to  lead  the  societies  into 
publicity,  so  that  even  the  initiations 
may  stand  public  scrutiny.  Public  opin- 
ion has  already,  in  the  better  colleges, 
suppressed  hazing.  The  authorities  can 
seldom  suppress  it :  they  can  merely 
clean  up  afterward  ;  and  often  they  may 
send  away  the  wrong  men. 

As  an  example  of  open  relation  be- 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      163 

tween  administrative  officers  and  stu- 
dents, I  give  you  a  dialogue  that  oc- 
curred in  a  strong  Quaker  college. 
"  Jones,"  said  the  president,  who  wastes 
few  words,  "  I  have  reason  to  believe 
thee  is  a  thief  and  a  liar."  "  No,  Mr. 
President,"  said  Jones,  "  I  am  a  liar ;  but 
I  am  not  a  thief. "  (It  is  interesting,  by  the 
way,  to  consider  where  this  leaves  Jones.) 
Above  all  things,  a  college  officer  should 
try  not  to  be  the  kind  of  man  of  whom 
the  late  Dr.  Carroll  Everett  said,  "He 
presents  different  aspects  of  a  truth  to 
different  persons."  I  cannot  say  with 
Mark  Twain  that  I  know  honesty  to  be 
the  best  policy  because  I  have  tried 
both  ;  but  I  know  it  to  be  the  best  policy 
because  I  have  seen  both.  In  a  college 
that  employs  no  spies,  the  student  him- 
self is  treated  as  the  greatest  living  au- 
thority on  his  own  conduct ;  and,  when 
he  is  questioned  about  it,  he  is  expected, 
as  a  gentleman,  to  tell  the  truth.  "  Is 
it  fair,"  people  sometimes  ask,  "this 


164  DISCIPLINE   IN 

expecting  a  man  to  bear  witness  against 
himself?"  Much  fairer  than  expecting 
others  to  bear  witness  against  him.  He 
understands  the  right  of  the  college  to 
call  him  to  account.  Again  and  again 
I  have  marvelled  at  the  frankness  of 
students  when  squarely  asked  what  they 
have  or  have  not  done,  at  the  persist- 
ency of  the  feeling  that,  even  if  they 
have  cheated  more  or  less,  they  cannot, 
as  gentlemen,  lie  when  talking  face  to 
face.  Of  course  there  are  exceptions, 
often  in  part  the  fault  of  the  college  offi- 
cer or  the  result  of  his  want  of  tact ;  yet 
in  general,  the  frankness  of  students, 
even  in  bad  things,  is  refreshing.  Not 
long  since,  a  man  whose  college  work 
was  done  but  who  had  not  yet  his  degree 
said  to  me,  "  I  must  leave  this  place.  I 
have  got  in  with  fellows  who  have  more 
money  than  I  and  live  more  expensively 
than  I ;  and  I  have  taken  to  drinking.  I 
must  get  out  into  the  country."  "  Temp- 
tation," as  Thackeray  says,  "is  an  ob- 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE       165 

sequious  servant,  who  has  no  objections 
to  the  country ; "  but  this  man's  imme- 
diate temptation  lay  among  certain  city 
associates.  "  I  had  been  drinking  too 
much,"  said  another  student,  "  and  when 
the  proctor  spoke  to  me  I  think  I  in- 
sulted him.  I  don't  know  what  I  said ;  I 
only  know  that  at  the  time  it  appeared 
to  me  amusing."  Another  student,  who 
wished  to  go  away  for  a  recess  a  day 
earlier  than  the  college  rules  allowed,  re- 
marked, "  It 's  only  cutting  one  lecture." 
When  I  explained  the  difficulty  of  keep- 
ing men  till  the  end  of  the  term,  and  the 
principle  involved  in  letting  a  single  one 
go,  he  exclaimed,  "  But  the  lecture 's  in 
such  a  darned  silly  course!"  an  improper 
remark,  no  doubt ;  yet  the  fact  that  he 
spoke  out  went  far  toward  making  up 
for  the  impropriety. 

Colonel  Thomas  Wentworth  Higgin- 
son  once  said  of  his  own  college  days 
that  a  student  seen  walking  with  an  in- 
structor lost  caste  at  once.  There  has 


166  DISCIPLINE   IN 

been  no  more  important  change  in  col- 
lege life  of  late  than  the  change  in  the 
relation  of  student  and  instructor.  In 
nearly  every  respect  the  struggle  for  an 
honest  and  friendly  relation  must  be  suc- 
cessful ;  but  success  comes  slowest  and 
most  doubtfully  in  questions  of  honesty 
in  written  work.  Even  here  a  person 
whose  written  work  is  dishonest  may  be 
perfectly  straightforward  in  confessing 
what  he  has  done,  —  might  go  to  the 
stake  rather  than  deny  it.  The  discour- 
aging thing  is  that  he  should  do  it  at  all. 
Equally  discouraging  is  his  defence.  He 
admits  that,  looked  at  critically,  he  has 
missed  an  educational  opportunity  ;  but 
the  loss  is  his  only,  and  need  not  worry 
the  Faculty :  if  detected,  he  cannot  ex- 
pect credit  for  his  composition ;  but  to 
suspend  him  is  monstrous.  He  himself 
affirms  that  he  did  what  everybody  does ; 
that  he  "had  to  hand  in  something," 
was  not  well,  and  was  short  of  time ; 
that  his  name  on  the  theme  is  a  mere 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      167 

label,  quite  non-committal  as  to  the 
question  of  authorship  ;  perhaps  that  he 
copied  from  a  book  which  the  instruc- 
tor "  could  not  help  knowing,"  and  that 
therefore  he  could  mean  no  deceit  (he 
"agreed  with  Thackeray's  ideas  and 
could  not  improve  on  his  language  "). 
He  adds  that  he  learned  to  "crib"  at 
school.  Soon  he  is  reinforced  by  a  father 
who  assures  the  Dean  that  the  young 
man  is  the  very  soul  of  honor,  and  that 
this  "  breach  of  the  rules  "  is  the  thought- 
lessness of  a  mere  boy,  which  will  never 
show  itself  again.  Like  many  students 
not  interested  in  their  studies,  he  fails 
to  see,  first,  that  the  greater  part  of  the 
dishonesty  of  the  world,  except  that  of 
professionally  dishonest  persons,  whom 
we,  since  we  deal  with  amateurs,  may 
disregard,  is  committed  by  men  under 
pressure,  by  men  who  feel  that  they  have 
not  time  or  resources  for  honesty ;  and 
he  fails  also  to  see  the  danger  of  fool- 
ing with  his  standard  of  truth.  Suppose 


168  DISCIPLINE   IN 

a  college  officer  has  promised  to  write 
something  for  a  college  paper.  No 
money  is  involved  and  no  glory.  He  is 
hard  pressed  for  time,  and  hard  pressed 
with  excellent  reasons  —  much  better 
than  those  of  the  idle  student.  Accord- 
ingly he  copies  something  from  another 
writer  and  prints  it  as  his  own.  If  dis- 
covered, he  will  justly  be  regarded  by 
every  student  as  a  dishonest  man  ;  yet, 
clear  as  the  student's  view  would  be  in 
the  case  I  have  supposed,  there  is  a  real 
difficulty  in  educating  the  public  opinion 
of  a  college  to  honesty  in  written  work,  — 
and  in  excuses  for  the  mild  indisposition 
with  which  some  students  are  often  and 
perfunctorily  afflicted.  No  penalty  has 
proved  satisfactory.  Our  common  pen- 
alty in  Cambridge  for  dishonesty  in 
written  work  is  suspension  ;  but  suspen- 
sion is  more  and  more  unsatisfactory  as 
years  go  by.  In  old  times  a  suspended 
student  was  rusticated,  as  it  was  called. 
Some  country  minister  took  him  in 


SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE       169 

charge  and  heard  his  lessons :  but,  with 
the  complexity  of  instruction  at  Ameri- 
can universities  to-day,  with  the  number 
of  courses  that  require  excellent  labo- 
ratory facilities  and  extensive  libraries, 
old-fashioned  rustication  becomes  impos- 
sible ;  and  the  suspended  student  is  in 
the  position  of  a  man  obliged  to  do  a 
certain  piece  of  work  by  the  very  au- 
thorities who  have  cut  off  his  opportu- 
nity of  doing  it.  I  suppose  we  must  wait 
in  this  matter  for  the  slowly  developed 
sense  of  documentary  honesty  among 
students.  The  "  honor  system,"  so  called, 
is  as  yet,  I  believe,  experimental.  What 
worries  me  about  putting  students  on 
their  honor  in  all  matters  of  written  work 
is  the  fact  that  they  cheat  most  in  those 
exercises  in  which  they  are  put  on  their 
honor  now. 

After  all,  the  most  serious  question  of 
discipline  in  the  college  of  to-day  is  how 
to  get  from  our  students  intellectual  work. 
Want  of  responsibility  to  work  rather 


170  DISCIPLINE  IN 

than  radical  dishonesty  is  at  the  root  of 
such  dishonest  acts  as  I  have  described. 
In  the  attitude  toward  work  a  consid- 
erable number  of  students  are  still  boys 
and  not  men.  It  is  only  in  athletics  that 
some  of  them  recognize  the  flimsiness  of 
excuses,  the  necessity  of  hard  training, 
the  responsibility  of  duty  day  by  day,  the 
meanness  of  the  "  quitter."  As  to  excuses, 
I  have  heard  a  college  officer  whose  busi- 
ness it  is  to  pass  on  them  described  as 
"  a  man  you  lie  to  and  get  mad  with  for 
not  believing  you  ;  "  and  this  definition 
shows  how  dexterously  the  unthinking 
student  uses  in  college  morals  a  double 
standard,  and  how  flexible  he  is  in  trans- 
forming himself  from  man  to  boy  and 
from  boy  to  man,  according  to  his  own 
immediate  advantage.  The  most  search- 
ing temptation  of  a  Freshman  when  he 
first  finds  himself  turned  loose  in  a  uni- 
versity is  the  temptation  to  idleness. 
Some  Freshmen  act  as  if  in  entering  col- 
lege they  had  scaled  the  mountain  of 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      171 

life  and  had  nothing  to  do  but  to  picnic 
on  the  summit.  Their  natural  desire  to 
get  into  this  or  that  club,  their  knowledge 
that  they  cannot  get  into  it  without  wide 
acquaintance,  and  their  belief  that  wide 
acquaintance  involves  free  use  of  social 
hours  at  all  times  of  the  day,  lead  them 
to  loafing.  Thus  far  the  influence  of  the 
club  is  bad,  though  later  a  clubman  may 
be  upheld  in  his  work  and  driven  to  his 
work  by  those  members  of  the  club  who 
see  his  danger.  The  radical  difficulty 
about  work  among  students  comes,  in 
part,  from  the  prevalent  theory  of  educa- 
tion through  which  boys  and  young  men 
have  things  done  for  them,  sometimes 
for  their  amusement,  sometimes  for  their 
information,  instead  of  being  taught  to 
do  things  for  themselves.  I  lately  talked 
with  an  intelligent  and  delightful  Sopho- 
more who  had  excused  himself  for  ab- 
sence on  the  ground  that  he  had  gone 
with  a  sick  companion  to  a  "  phizician." 
I  cheerfully  accepted  his  excuse,  but  told 


i;2  DISCIPLINE  IN 

him  that  I  did  not  like  to  see  him  spell 
physician  in  that  way.  "  I  know,"  he  re- 
plied, "  I  did  n't  know  how  to  spell  that 
word :  mamma  was  n't  at  home  ;  and  I 
did  n't  know."  Yet  this  boy  came  from 
a  school  recognized  as  among  the  best, 
and  from  educated  parents ;  and  even 
in  Boston,  mamma,  when  she  goes  out, 
leaves  the  dictionary  behind  her.  Possi- 
bly he  was  like  the  other  student  who 
said,  "What 's  the  use  of  looking  in  the 
dictionary  for  a  word  if  you  don't  know 
the  letter  it  begins  with  ?  " 

A  large  part  of  the  discipline  of  a  col- 
lege, in  the  widest  sense  of  the  word 
discipline,  lies  in  the  training  toward 
power  for  the  emergencies  and  the  strains 
of  life.  Even  the  knowledge  a  student 
acquires  is  of  value  chiefly  to  that  end. 
Now  nobody  ever  got  power  through 
being  amused  and  having  things  done 
for  him.  This  principle  is,  as  I  have  inti- 
mated, recognized  in  athletics  ;  and  hence 
comes  much  of  the  value  of  athletics. 


SCHOOL  AND  COLLEGE     173 

In  school  or  college  no  discipline  is  effec- 
tive which  does  not  emphasize  work,  the 
duty  of  boy  or  man  to  do  whatever  is 
before  him,  and  by  doing  it  to  get  inter- 
ested in  it.  "  We  have  no  serious  diffi- 
culty in  the  conduct  of  our  boys,"  said  the 
master  of  a  new  school ;  "  we  have  found 
them  courteous,  obedient,  well  disposed  ; 
but  it  has  taken  us  weeks  to  make  them 
understand  that  the  first  thing  to  do 
is  their  work."  This  same  master  has 
devised  a  seal  for  the  school,  a  shield 
adorned  with  a  hammer  and  an  anvil ; 
and  round  about  the  shield  are  the  words, 
"  Veritas,  Fides,  Labor."  The  difficulty 
that  he  finds  we  find  in  college  —  and 
in  a  higher  degree  —  because  in  college 
the  students  are  less  closely  supervised, 
and  need  not  recite  every  day  in  every- 
thing they  are  supposed  to  study. 

What  I  have  said  is  by  no  means 
inconsistent  with  the  advocacy  of  an 
elective  system,  since  every  study,  if  it 
is  to  have  more  than  a  mere  cultivating 


i/4  DISCIPLINE  IN 

value,  demands  solid  work.  Not  long 
ago  the  Administrative  Board  of  Harvard 
College  sent  away  eight  or  ten  Fresh- 
men for  loafing.  Every  one  of  these 
Freshmen  was  quite  capable  of  doing  his 
work  ;  every  one,  I  believe,  had  come 
from  what  we  must  call  a  good  school ; 
many  of  them  were  unusually  attractive 
boys,  and  by  no  means  bad  boys ;  not 
one  of  them  would  heed  the  warnings  of 
the  college  authorities  ;  and,  with  great 
tribulation,  they  left  us.  Every  one  left 
us  with  the  understanding  that,  though 
the  door  was  shut,  he  might  by  good 
work  outside,  and  by  certain  examina- 
tions which  are  offered  every  year,  open  it 
again.  It  is  true  of  most  of  these  Fresh- 
men that  nothing  in  their  college  life 
became  them  like  the  leaving  it.  No 
one  could  talk  with  them  and  not  feel  an 
intense  personal  interest  in  them  as  mis- 
guided boys,  blind  boys,  whose  eyes  could 
be  opened  by  nothing  but  adversity. 
"If,"  said  the  late  Professor  Dunbar,  "a 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE      175 

dean  regards  himself  as  something  more 
than  a  prosecuting  officer,  it  is  interesting 
to  see  how  you  can  help  some  of  these 
fellows  through ; "  and  he  would  have 
been  slow  to  deny  the  helpfulness  of  tem- 
porary adversity.  Let  me  say  once  more 
that  the  root  of  all  discipline,  whether  dis- 
cipline for  efficiency  in  life  or  discipline 
for  the  development  of  character,  for  the 
resistance  of  temptation,  is  in  steady, 
whole-hearted  work,  whether  the  subject 
of  the  work  is  at  first  sight  alluring  or 
forbidding. 

I  do  not  believe  in  crowding  children 
with  study.  The  hours  of  work  may 
be  short;  and  for  many  children  they 
should  be  short.  I  find  myself  strangely 
at  variance  with  the  men  who  lead  the 
educational  thought  of  to-day ;  though  I 
believe  more  strongly  than  they  in  pre- 
scribing work  for  boys,  I  do  not  believe 
that  American  boys  should  go  to  college 
much  earlier  than  they  go  now.  Many 
writers  on  education  overlook,  I  think, 


176  DISCIPLINE  IN 

the  time  lost  in  the  mere  sicknesses  of 
childhood.  I  should  rather,  for  instance, 
have  my  boy  go  to  college  a  year  later 
than  force  him  to  injure  his  eyes  by 
hard  work  after  measles.  Again,  what- 
ever may  be  true  of  European  children, 
the  American  child  lives  in  an  atmos- 
phere peculiarly  stimulating,  peculiarly 
dangerous  to  the  nervous  system.  The 
over-stimulating  of  ambitious  children 
during  the  time  of  rapid  bodily  growth, 
especially  during  the  marked  physical 
changes  which  lead  from  youth  to  man- 
hood or  womanhood,  may  damage  the 
children  and  the  race.  Not  long  ago  I 
heard  a  professor,  himself  a  German,  say 
with  pride  that  in  the  summer  he  gave 
his  boy  of  fifteen  a  quarter  of  a  dollar 
for  every  morning  that  he  got  up  at  four 
to  study,  and  that  the  boy  used  his  first 
dollar  in  buying  an  alarm  clock.  I  doubt 
whether  our  American  children  will  ever 
be  physically  and  intellectually  mature 
so  early  as  the  German  children  or  the 


SCHOOL   AND   COLLEGE      177 

French ;  but  while  they  work,  they  should 
understand  that  work  is  to  be  done  ener- 
getically and  thoroughly. 

One  thing  more :  we  cannot  discipline 
boys  or  young  men  by  trying  to  tell  them 
all  the  things  they  should  not  do.  The 
number  of  definite  prohibitions  should,  I 
believe,  be  small.  Nobody  can  cover  the 
ground.  In  a  college  which  used  to  make 
some  small  attempt  at  covering  it,  I  have 
heard  a  gambler  defended  by  a  clergy- 
man on  the  ground  that  gambling  was 
not  prohibited  by  the  rules. 

To  me  the  conclusion  of  the  whole 
matter  is  this :  The  best  discipline, 
whether  of  school  or  of  college,  is  that 
which  relies  on  the  understanding  be- 
tween pupil  and  teacher  that  the  objects 
of  pupil  and  teacher  are  one  and  the 
same ;  a  discipline  based  on  sympathy 
with  all  the  healthy  interests  of  youth  — 
not  on  weak  compassion  for  the  un- 
healthy temptations,  though  there  may 
be  a  sort  of  bracing  compassion,  even 


i;8  DISCIPLINE  IN 

for  them  ;  a  discipline  which  allows  last- 
ing friendship  with  pupils  who  must 
be  dismissed  or  expelled  ;  a  discipline 
which  relies  on  cooperation,  wherever 
such  cooperation  is  reasonable,  with  the 
leaders  among  the  pupils,  and  through 
the  leaders  with  the  great  body  of  the 
pupils ;  a  discipline  based  on  absolute 
straightforwardness  and  perfect  courtesy 
—  for  perfect  courtesy  is  consistent  with 
absolute  straightforwardness ;  a  disci- 
pline which  counts  it  no  loss  of  dignity 
for  an  instructor  or  a  master  to  explain 
his  point  of  view  ;  a  discipline  which  in- 
sists that  there  is  no  training  without 
work,  and  that  the  work  must  not  be 
done  by  the  trainer  only;  a  discipline 
which  remembers  that  it  is  want  of  train- 
ing which  temporarily  wrecks  many  a 
Freshman,  and  makes  his  evolution  into 
energetic  manhood  discouragingly  slow. 
I  believe,  further,  that  in  every  school 
and  in  every  college  there  should  be  an 
effort  from  the  start  to  make  a  youth 


SCHOOL  AND   COLLEGE      179 

imbibe  that  wonderful  tonic  called  school 
or  college  spirit ;  to  make  him  feel  that 
from  the  moment  he  enters  a  school  or  a 
college  he  has  become  forever  a  part  of 
it,  one  of  its  makers,  and  that  through- 
out his  life,  wherever  he  goes,  he  takes 
with  him,  dragging  or  exalting  it,  as  the 
case  may  be,  the  name  of  his  school  or 
of  his  college.  Once  get  a  deep,  high 
loyalty,  and  the  problem  of  discipline  is 
gone. 


THE  MISTAKES  OF  COLLEGE 
LIFE 


THE  MISTAKES   OF  COLLEGE 
LIFE 

A  TALK  TO  BOYS  ON  THE  POINT  OF 
ENTERING  COLLEGE 

IN  a  certain  sense,  college  is  the  place 
for  mistakes.  In  college  a  young  man 
tests  his  strength,  and,  while  testing  it, 
is  protected  from  the  results  of  failure  far 
more  effectively  than  he  will  ever  be  pro- 
tected afterward.  The  youth  who  is  de- 
termined to  succeed  in  public  speaking 
may  stand  up  again  and  again  in  a  col- 
lege debating  club,  may  fail  again  and 
again,  and  through  his  failure  may  rise 
to  success ;  whereas  if  he  should  put  off 
his  efforts  until  some  political  campaign 
had  called  him  to  the  stump,  no  audience 
would  listen  to  him,  or  even  let  him  go 


184          THE   MISTAKES   OF 

on.  "  The  mistakes  that  make  us  men," 
says  Dr.  Lyman  Abbott,  "  are  better  than 
the  accuracies  that  keep  us  children." 
Yet  even  in  college  there  are  mistakes 
by  which  the  career  of  a  happy,  well- 
meaning  youth  is  suddenly  darkened  ; 
and  though  he  may  learn  out  of  the  very 
bitterness  of  his  experience,  he  is  never 
quite  the  same  again. 

All  boys  with  a  fair  chance  in  the  world 
have  at  their  best  a  common  motive,  — 
to  be  of  some  use,  to  lead  active,  efficient 
lives,  to  do  something  worth  doing,  and 
to  do  it  well,  to  become  men  on  whom 
people  instinctively  and  not  in  vain  rely. 
Men  and  women  may  be  divided  roughly 
into  two  classes, — those  who  are  "there," 
and  those  who  are  "  not  there."  The 
"  not  there "  people  may  be  clever, 
may  be  what  is  called  "  good  company," 
may  have,  even  after  you  know  them 
pretty  well,  a  good  deal  of  personal 
charm ;  but  once  know  them  through 
and  through,  and  you  have  no  use  for 


COLLEGE   LIFE  185 

them.  The  "  there  "  people  may  be  un- 
polished, unmagnetic,  without  social 
charm ;  but  once  understand  that  they 
are  "  there,"  and  you  get  help  and  com- 
fort from  the  mere  knowledge  that  there 
are  such  people  in  the  world.  Every  boy 
in  his  heart  of  hearts  admires  a  man  who 
is  "  there,"  and  wishes  to  be  like  him  ; 
but  not  every  boy  (and  here  is  the  sad 
part  of  it)  understands  that  to  be  "  there" 
is  the  result  of  a  long  process,  the  result 
of  training  day  by  day  and  year  by  year, 
precisely  as  to  be  a  sure  man  (I  do  not 
say  a  brilliant  man)  in  the  pitcher's  box 
or  behind  the  bat  is  the  result  of  long 
training.  A  single  decision  or  indecision, 
an  act  of  a  moment  or  a  moment's  fail- 
ure to  act,  may  turn  a  whole  life  awry ; 
but  the  weakness  of  that  moment  is  only 
the  expression  of  a  weakness  which  for 
months  or  for  years  has  been  undermin- 
ing the  character,  or  at  best  the  result  of 
a  failure  to  train  body,  mind,  and  heart 
for  the  emergencies  of  life. 


186          THE  MISTAKES  OF 

In  this  training  we  can  learn,  if  we 
will,  from  other  people's  experience ;  and 
although  boys  are  loath  to  accept  any- 
body's experience  but  their  own,  and  are 
not  always  wise  enough  to  accept  that, 
it  is  yet  worth  while  to  show  them  some 
dangers  which  other  boys  have  met  or 
have  failed  to  meet,  that  they  may  not 
be  taken  unawares.  A  great  man,  almost 
too  far  above  the  temptations  of  the  aver- 
age boy  to  understand  them,  has  con- 
demned talking  to  boys  and  young  men 
about  temptation ;  he  would  fill  their 
minds  with  good  things :  but  there  are 
no  boys  whose  minds  are  so  full  of  good 
things  that  a  temptation  cannot  get  in 
edgewise.  An  absorbing  interest  in  a 
good  something  or  a  good  somebody 
holds  back  and  may  finally  banish  the 
worst  temptations ;  it  is  quite  as  impor- 
tant to  interest  boys  in  good  things  as 
to  take  away  their  interest  in  bad  ones  : 
but  when  all  is  said,  the  lightest  hearted 
boy  who  comes  to  manhood  must  come 


COLLEGE  LIFE  187 

to  it  "through  sorrows  and  through 
scars." 

To  many  boys  the  beginning  of  col- 
lege life  is  the  first  step  into  the  world. 
Its  dangers  are  much  like  those  of  other 
first  steps  into  the  world,  yet  with  this 
difference :  the  college  boy  has  the  ad- 
vantage of  living  where  ideals  are  noble, 
and  the  disadvantage  (if  he  is  weak  or 
immature)  of  living  where  he  need  not 
get  heartily  tired  day  after  day  in  keep- 
ing long,  inevitable  hours  of  work.  This 
disadvantage  is  indeed  a  privilege,  but  a 
privilege  which  like  all  privileges  is  bad 
unless  accorded  to  a  responsible  being. 
To  discipline  one's  self,  to  hold  one's  self 
responsible,  is  ever  so  much  better  than 
to  be  disciplined,  to  be  held  responsible 
by  somebody  else ;  but  it  is  a  task  for  a 
man.  Naturally  enough,  then,  the  mis- 
takes and  the  sins  of  college  life  are 
commonly  rooted  in  boyish  irresponsi- 
bility. 

The  average  youth  takes  kindly  to  the 


188          THE   MISTAKES   OF 

notion  that  in  the  first  year  or  two  at 
college  he  need  not  be  bound  by  the  or- 
dinary restraints  of  law-abiding  men  and 
women.  "Boys  will  be  boys,"  even  to 
the  extent  of  sowing  wild  oats.  Time 
enough  to  settle  down  by  and  by  ;  mean- 
while the  world  is  ours.  A  year  or  so 
of  lawlessness  will  be  great  fun,  and  will 
give  us  large  experience ;  and  even  if 
we  shock  some  good  people,  we  are  but 
doing  the  traditional  thing.  A  youth 
who  feels  thus  takes  prompt  offence  if 
treated,  as  he  says,  "  like  a  kid ; "  yet  he 
may  do  things  so  low  that  any  honest 
child  would  despise  them.  Nor  is  this 
true  of  one  sex  only.  I  have  heard  a  mar- 
ried woman  recount  with  satisfaction  her 
two  nights'  work  in  stealing  a  sign  when 
she  was  at  college ;  and  her  father,  a  col- 
lege man,  listened  with  sympathetic  joy. 
I  have  known  a  youth  who  held  a  large 
scholarship  in  money  to  steal,  or  —  as  he 
preferred  to  say  —  "  pinch,"  an  instru- 
ment worth  several  dollars  from  the  lab- 


COLLEGE   LIFE  189 

oratory  where  he  was  trusted  as  he  would 
have  been  trusted  in  a  gentleman's  par- 
lor. I  have  even  heard  of  students  who 
bought  signs,  and  hung  them  up  in  their 
rooms  to  get  the  reputation  of  stealing 
them.  Surely  there  is  nothing  in  college 
life  to  make  crime  a  joke.  A  street 
"mucker"  sneaks  into  a  student's  room 
and  steals  half  a  dozen  neckties  (for 
which  the  student  has  not  paid),  and 
nothing  is  too  hard  for  him ;  a  student 
steals  a  poor  laundry  man's  sign  for  fun : 
may  a  gentleman  do  without  censure 
what  sends  a  "mucker"  to  jail?  If  the 
gentleman  is  locked  up  in  the  evening 
to  be  taken  before  the  judge  in  the  morn- 
ing, his  friends  are  eager  to  get  him  out. 
Yet  in  one  night  of  ascetic  meditation 
he  may  learn  more  than  in  his  whole 
previous  life  of  his  relation  to  the  rights 
of  his  fellow  men.  One  of  the  first  les- 
sons in  college  life  is  an  axiom :  Crime 
is  crime,  and  a  thief  is  a  thief,  even  at  an 
institution  of  learning.  The  college  thief 


190  THE  MISTAKES   OF 

has,  it  is  true,  a  different  motive  from  his 
less  favored  brother ;  but  is  the  motive 
better  ?  Is  there  not  at  the  root  of  it  a 
misunderstanding  of  one  man's  relation 
to  another,  so  selfish  that,  in  those  who 
ought  to  be  the  flower  of  American 
youth,  it  would  be  hardly  conceivable  if 
we  did  not  see  it  with  our  own  eyes? 
People  sometimes  wonder  at  the  de- 
sire of  towns  to  tax  colleges,  instead 
of  helping  them.  A  small  number  of 
students  who  steal  signs,  and  refuse  to 
pay  bills  unless  the  tradesman's  man- 
ner, pleases  them,  may  well  account  for 
it  all. 

As  there  is  nothing  in  college  life  to 
justify  a  thief,  so  there  is  nothing  in  it 
to  justify  a  liar.  College  boys  in  their 
relation  to  one  another  are  quite  as  truth- 
ful as  other  people ;  but  some  of  them 
regard  their  dealings  with  college  author- 
ities as  some  men  regard  horse-trades. 
We  know  them  capable  of  distinguish- 
ing truth  from  falsehood,  since  their 


COLLEGE   LIFE  191 

standard  of  integrity  for  their  teachers 
is  sensitively  high.  Their  standard  for 
themselves  is  part  of  that  conceit,  of 
that  blind  incapacity  for  the  Golden 
Rule,  which  is  often  characteristic  of 
early  manhood.  To  this  blindness  most 
books  about  school  and  college  life  con- 
tribute. Even  the  healthier  of  these 
books  stir  the  reader's  sympathy  in  be- 
half of  the  gentlemanly,  happy-go-lucky 
youth  who  pulls  wool  over  the  eyes  of 
his  teachers,  and  deepen  the  impression 
that  college  boys  live  in  a  fairyland  of 
charming  foolery,  and  are  no  more  mor- 
ally responsible  than  the  gods  of  Olym- 
pus. Plainly  such  a  theory  of  college 
life,  even  if  no  one  holds  to  it  long, 
nurses  a  selfishness  and  an  insincerity 
which  may  outlast  the  theory  that  has 
nourished  them.  The  man  who  has  his 
themes  written  for  him,  or  who  cribs  at 
examinations,  or  who  excuses  himself 
from  college  lectures  because  of  "sick- 
ness "  in  order  to  rest  after  or  before  a 


192  THE   MISTAKES   OF 

dance,  may  be  clever  and  funny  to  read 
about;  but  his  cleverness  and  "funni- 
ness"  are  not  many  degrees  removed 
from  those  of  the  forger  and  the  im- 
postor, who  may  also  be  amusing  in 
fiction. 

Another  bad  thing  in  the  substitution 
of  excuses,  even  fairly  honest  excuses, 
for  work  is  the  weakening  effect  of  it  on 
everyday  life.  The  work  of  the  world  is 
in  large  measure  done  by  people  whose 
heads  and  throats  and  stomachs  do  not 
feel  just  right,  but  who  go  about  their 
daily  duties,  and  in  doing  them  forget 
their  heads  and  throats  and  stomachs. 
He  who  is  to  be  "  there  "  as  a  man  can- 
not afford  to  cosset  himself  as  a  boy.  A 
well-known  railroad  man  has  remarked 
that  he  knows  in  his  business  two  kinds 
of  men :  one,  with  a  given  piece  of  work 
to  do  before  a  given  time,  comes  back  at 
the  appointed  hour  and  says,  "  That  job 
is  done.  I  found  unexpected  difficulties, 
but  it  is  done ; "  the  other  comes  back 


COLLEGE   LIFE  193 

with  "several  excellent  reasons"  why 
the  job  is  not  done.  "  I  have,"  says  the 
railroad  man,  "  no  use  for  the  second  of 
these  men."  Nor  has  any  business  man 
use  for  him.  The  world  is  pretty  cold 
toward  chronic  invalids  and  excuse- 
mongers.  "  If  you  are  too  sick  to  be 
here  regularly,"  it  says,  "  I  am  sorry  for 
you,  but  I  shall  have  to  employ  a  health- 
ier man."  You  will  find,  by  the  way, 
that  it  is  easier  to  attend  all  your  re- 
citations than  to  attend  half  or  three- 
quarters  of  them.  Once  open  the  ques- 
tion of  not  going,  and  you  see  "  several 
excellent  reasons  "  for  staying  at  home. 
Routine,  as  all  mature  men  know,  stead- 
ies nerves,  and,  when  used  intelligently, 
adds  contentment  to  life. 

I  have  spoken  of  lying  to  college  offi- 
cers, and  of  excuses  which,  if  I  may  use 
an  undergraduate  expression,  "  may  be 
right,  but  are  not  stylish  right."  I  come 
next  to  the  question  of  responsibility  to 
father  and  mother  in  matters  of  truth  and 


194   •      THE   MISTAKES   OF 

falsehood.  One  of  the  evils  from  vice  of 
all  sorts  at  college  is  the  lying  that  re- 
sults from  it.  Shame  and  fear,  half  dis- 
guised as  a  desire  not  to  worry  parents, 
cut  off  many  a  father  and  mother  from 
knowing  what  they  have  a  right  to 
know,  and  what  they,  if  confided  in, 
might  remedy.  I  have  seldom  seen  a 
student  in  serious  trouble  who  did  not 
say —  honestly  enough,  I  presume — that 
he  cared  less  for  his  own  mortification 
than  for  his  father's  and  mother's.  As 
a  rule,  one  of  his  parents  is  threatened 
with  nervous  prostration,  or  oppressed 
with  business  cares,  or  has  a  weak  heart 
which,  as  the  son  argues,  makes  the 
receipt  of  bad  news  dangerous.  Filial 
affection,  which  has  been  so  dormant  as 
to  let  the  student  do  those  things  which 
would  distress  his  parents  most,  awakes 
instantly  at  the  thought  that  the  parents 
must  learn  what  he  has  done.  The  two 
severest  rebukes  of  a  certain  gentle  mo- 
ther were :  "  You  ought  to  have  meant 


COLLEGE   LIFE  195 

not  to,"  and  "  You  ought  to  have  been 
sorry  beforehand." 

Many  a  student,  knowing  that  the 
college  must  communicate  with  his  fa- 
ther, will  not  nerve  himself  to  the  duty 
and  the  filial  kindness  of  telling  his  fa- 
ther first.  I  remember  a  boy  who  was  to 
be  suspended  for  drunkenness,  and  who 
was  urged  to  break  the  news  to  his  fa- 
ther before  the  official  letter  went. 

"  You  don't  know  my  father,"  he  said. 
"  My  father  is  a  very  severe  man,  and  I 
can't  tell  him." 

"  The  only  thing  you  can  do  for  him," 
was  the  answer,  "  is  to  let  him  feel  that 
you  are  able  and  willing  to  tell  him  first, 
—  that  you  give  him  your  confidence." 

"  Oh,  you  don't  know  him,"  said  the 
boy  again. 

"Is  there  any  'out'  about  your  father?" 

"  No  "  (indignantly)  I  "  You  would 
respect  him  and  admire  him ;  but  he 
is  a  very  severe  man." 

"  Then  he  has  a  right   to  hear  and 


196         THE  MISTAKES   OF 

to  hear  first  from  you.  You  cannot 
help  him  more  than  by  telling  him,  or 
hurt  him  more  than  by  hiding  the  truth 
from  him." 

A  day  or  two  later  the  boy  came  back 
to  the  college  office.  "My  father  is  a 
brick ! "  he  said.  In  his  confession  he  had 
learned  for  the  first  time  how  much  his 
father  cared  for  him. 

A  young  man,  intensely  curious  about 
the  wickedness  of  life,  is  easily  persuaded 
that  the  first  business  of  a  college  student 
is  "to  know  life,"  —  that  is,  to  know  the 
worst  things  in  it ;  and,  in  the  pursuit  of 
wisdom,  he  sets  out  in  the  evening,  with 
others,  merely  to  see  the  vice  of  a  great 
city.  He  calls  at  a  house  where  he  meets 
bad  men  and  bad  women,  and  eats  and 
drinks  with  them.  What  he  eats  and 
drinks  he  does  not  know;  but  in  the 
morning  he  is  still  there,  with  a  life  stain 
upon  him,  and  needing  more  than  ever 
before  to  confide  in  father  or  mother  or 
in  some  good  physician.  Yet  the  people 


COLLEGE   LIFE  197 

who  can  help  him  most,  the  people  also 
in  whom  he  must  confide  or  be  false  to 
them,  are  the  very  people  he  avoids. 

Again,  it  is  hard  to  prove  by  cold  logic 
that  gambling  is  wrong.  A  young  man 
says  to  himself,  "  If  I  wish  to  spend  a  dol- 
lar in  this  form  of  amusement,  why  should 
I  not  ?  I  know  perfectly  well  what  I  am 
about  I  am  playing  with  money  not  play- 
ing for  it.  In  some  countries  —  in  Eng- 
land, for  example — clergymen,  and  good 
people  generally,  play  whist  with  shilling 
stakes,  and  would  not  think  of  playing  it 
without."  So  of  vice  he  says,  "  No  man 
knows  human  nature  until  he  has  seen 
the  dark  side.  I  shall  be  a  broader  man 
if  I  know  these  things ;  and  some  phy- 
sicians recommend  the  practice  of  them 
in  moderation."  When  we  say,  "  Lead 
us  not  into  temptation,"  we  forget  that 
one  of  the  worst  temptations  in  the  world 
is  the  temptation  to  be  led  into  tempta- 
tion, —  the  temptation  to  gratify  vulgar 
curiosity,  and  to  see  on  what  thin  ice  we 


198         THE   MISTAKES   OF 

can  walk.  No  man  is  safe ;  no  man  can 
tell  what  he  shall  do,  or  what  others  will 
do  to  him,  if  he  once  enters  a  gambling 
house  or  a  brothel.  The  history  of  every 
city,  and  the  history  of  every  college,  will 
prove  what  I  say.  There  is  no  wisdom 
in  looking  at  such  places,  —  nothing  but 
greenness  and  folly.  The  difficulty  with 
gambling  is,  as  some  one  has  said,  that 
"  it  eats  the  heart  out  of  a  man,"  —  that 
imperceptibly  the  playing  with  slips  into 
the  playing  for,  until  without  gambling 
life  seems  tame  :  and  the  difficulty  with 
vice  is  that  it  involves  physical  danger 
of  the  most  revolting  kind  ;  that  it  kills 
self-respect ;  that  it  brings  with  it  either 
shamelessness  or  a  miserable  dishonesty 
for  decency's  sake  ;  and  that  it  is  a  breach 
of  trust  to  those  who  are,  or  who  are 
to  be,  the  nearest  and  the  dearest,  —  a 
breach  of  trust  to  father  and  mother,  and 
to  the  wife  and  children,  who  may  seem 
remote  and  unreal,  but  who  to  most 
young  men  are  close  at  hand.  By  the 


COLLEGE   LIFE  199 

time  a  boy  goes  to  college,  he  may  well 
feel  responsibility  to  the  girl  whom  some 
day  he  will  respect  and  love,  and  who, 
he  hopes,  will  respect  and  love  him.  A 
boy's  or  man's  sense  of  fair  play  should 
show  him  that  it  is  effrontery  in  a  man 
who  has  been  guilty  of  vice  with  women 
to  ask  for  a  pure  girl's  love.  The  time  is 
only  too  likely  to  come  when  a  young 
fellow  who  has  yielded  to  the  tremendous 
sudden  temptation  that  is  thrown  at  him 
in  college  and  in  the  world,  will  face  the 
bitter  question,  "  Can  I  tell  the  truth 
about  myself  to  the  girl  I  love  ?  If  I  tell 
it,  I  may  justly  lose  her  ;  if  I  do  not  tell 
it,  my  whole  life  may  be  a  frightened  lie." 

"  Who  is  the  Happy  Husband  ?  He 
Who,  scanning  his  unwedded  life, 
Thanks  Heaven,  with  a  conscience  free, 
'T  was  faithful  to  his  future  wife." 

Not  merely  the  curiosity  which  listens 
to  false  arguments  about  life  and  wisdom, 
but  the  awful  loneliness  of  a  boy  far  from 
home,  may  lead  to  vice  and  misery.  The 


200          THE  MISTAKES   OF 

boy  who  is  used  to  girls  at  home,  and 
who  knows  in  his  new  surroundings  no 
such  girls  as  he  knew  at  home,  no  such 
girls  as  his  sisters'  friends,  is  only  too 
likely  to  scrape  an  easy  acquaintance 
with  some  of  those  inferior  girls  by  whom 
every  student  is  seen  in  a  kind  of  glamour, 
and  to  whom  acquaintance  with  students 
is  the  chief  excitement  of  life.  With  little 
education,  much  giddy  vanity,  and  no 
refinement,  these  girls  may  yet  possess  a 
sort  of  cheap  attractiveness.  They  are, 
besides,  easy  to  get  acquainted  with,  easy 
to  be  familiar  with,  and  interesting  sim- 
ply because  they  are  girls  —  for  the  time 
being,  the  only  accessible  girls.  I  need 
not  dwell  on  the  embarrassment,  the  sor- 
row, and  even  the  crime,  in  which  such 
friendships  may  end;  but  I  may  empha- 
size the  responsibility  of  every  man, 
young  or  old,  towards  every  woman. 
"  Every  free  and  generous  spirit,"  said 
Milton,  "ought  to  be  born  a  knight." 
It  is  the  part  of  a  man  to  protect  these 


COLLEGE   LIFE  201 

girls  against  themselves.  If  they  know 
no  better  than  to  hint  to  a  student  that 
they  should  like  to  see  his  room  some 
evening,  he  knows  better  than  to  take 
the  hint,  —  better  than  to  suffer  them 
through  him  to  do  what,  though  it  may 
not  stain  their  character,  may  yet  de- 
stroy their  good  name.  No  girls  stand 
more  in  need  of  chivalry  than  these  vain 
girls,  not  yet  bad,  who  flutter  about  the 
precincts  of  a  college. 

Students  know  what  responsibility 
means ;  but  their  views  of  it  are  dis- 
torted. They  demand  it  of  their  elders  ; 
in  certain  parts  of  athletics  they  demand 
it  of  themselves.  Which  is  the  worse 
breach  of  faith,  to  sit  up  a  quarter  of 
an  hour  later  than  your  athletic  trainer 
allows,  or  to  betray  the  trust  that  father 
and  mother  have  put  in  you,  to  gamble 
away  or  to  spend  on  low  women  the 
money  sent  you  for  your  term-bill,  and 
to  cover  all  with  a  lie  ? 

It  may  be  from  a  dim  notion  of  these 


202         THE   MISTAKES   OF 

eccentricities  in  undergraduate  judgment 
that  many  boys  cultivate  irresponsibility 
with  a  view  to  social  success.  Social  am- 
bition is  the  strongest  power  in  many  a 
student's  college  life,  a  power  compared 
with  which  all  the  rules  and  all  the  threats 
of  the  Faculty,  who  blindly  ignore  it,  are 
impotent,  a  power  that  robs  boys  of  their 
independence,  leading  them  to  do  things 
foolish  or  worse  and  thereby  to  defeat 
their  own  end.  For  in  the  long  run,  —  in 
the  later  years  of  the  college  course,  — 
the  "  not  there  "  and  the  "  there  "  can  be 
clearly  distinguished.  A  student  may  be 
poor,  he  may  not  play  poker,  he  may  not 
drink,  he  may  be  free  from  all  vice,  he 
may  not  even  smoke  ;  and  yet,  if  his 
virtue  is  not  showy,  he  will  be  popular 
—  provided  he  "  does  something  for  his 
class."  "He  is  a  bully  fellow," the  students 
say.  "  He  is  in  training  all  the  time." 

I  say  little  of  responsibility  to  younger 
students.  An  older  student  who  misleads 
a  younger  gets  just  about  the  name  he 


COLLEGE   LIFE  203 

deserves.  Even  the  Sophomore  who  se- 
riously hazes  a  Freshman  is  now  in  the 
better  colleges  recognized  as  a  coward. 
Cowardice  once  recognized,  cannot  long 
prevail ;  yet  there  was  a  time  when  it 
took  a  deal  of  courage  for  a  few  young 
men  in  one  of  our  great  colleges  to  stop 
an  outbreak  of  hazing.  It  took  a  deal 
of  courage ;  but  they  did  it.  After  all, 
a  student  admires  nothing  so  much  as 
"  sand."  What  he  needs  is  to  see  that 
"  sand  "  belongs  not  merely  in  war  and 
athletics,  but  in  everyday  life,  and  that 
in  everyday  life  "sand"  may  be  accu- 
mulated. A  Harvard  student,  it  is  said, 
was  nearly  dressed  one  morning  and 
was  choosing  a  necktie,  when  his  door, 
which  with  the  carelessness  of  youth  he 
had  left  unlocked,  suddenly  opened.  A 
woman  entered,  closed  the  door  behind 
her,  put  her  back  to  it,  and  said,  "  I  want 
fifty  dollars.  If  you  don't  give  it  to  me, 
I  shall  scream."  The  young  man,  still 
examining  his  neckties,  quietly  replied, 


204         THE   MISTAKES   OF 

"  You  'd  better  holler ; "  and  the  woman 
went  out.  Had  he  given  her  money,  had 
he  even  paid  serious  attention  to  her 
threat,  he  might  have  been  in  her  power 
for  life ;  but  his  coolness  saved  him.  An- 
other undergraduate,  who  before  coming 
to  college  had  worked  as  an  engineer, 
and  who  was  a  few  years  older  than 
most  of  his  class,  went  one  evening  to 
an  officer  of  the  college  who  knew  some- 
thing of  him,  and  said,  "  I  hardly  know 
just  how  I  ought  to  speak  to  you  ;  but 
in  my  building  there  is  a  Freshman  who 
is  going  to  pieces,  and  a  Senior  who  is 
largely  responsible  for  it."  He  then  told 
what  he  had  seen,  and  gave  the  names 
of  both  men.  "  If  I  look  this  up,"  said 
the  college  officer,  "are  you  willing  to 
appear  in  it?  Are  you  willing  to  have 
your  name  known  ?  "  "I'd  rather  not 
be  '  queered,'  "  he  answered  ;  "  but  if  it 
is  necessary  to  be  'queered,'  I  will  be." 
All  this  happened  in  a  college  which 
employs  no  spies  and  discourages  tale- 


COLLEGE  LIFE  205 

bearing.  For  anything  the  student  knew, 
the  officer  himself  might  think  him  a 
malicious  informer.  The  "  sand  "  in  the 
hero  of  the  first  of  these  little  stories  any 
boy  would  see.  To  see  the  "  sand "  in 
the  hero  of  the  second  takes  some  ex- 
perience ;  but  "  sand,"  and  "  sand "  of 
the  finest  quality,  was  there.  This  man's 
notion  of  the  responsibility  of  older  stu- 
dents to  younger  ones  had  in  it  some- 
thing positive.  "  You  have  no  idea," 
said  a  senator  to  Father  Taylor,  the 
sailor  preacher,  who  had  rebuked  him 
for  his  vote,  "  You  have  no  idea  what  the 
outside  pressure  was."  "  Outside  pres- 
sure, Mr.  Senator  !  Outside  pressure ! 
Where  were  your  inside  braces?"  To 
run  the  risk  of  being  thought  a  common 
informer  when  you  are  not,  and  to  run 
it  because  you  cannot  let  a  man  go  under 
without  trying  to  pull  him  out,  requires 
such  inside  braces  as  few  undergraduates 
possess. 

Let  me  say,  however,  that  there  is  no 


206         THE  MISTAKES  OF 

better  hope  for  Harvard  College  than  in 
the  readiness  of  the  strong  to  help  the 
weak.  A  youth  is  summoned  to  the  col- 
lege office,  behindhand  in  his  work,  and 
bad  in  his  way  of  living.  The  Faculty 
has  done  its  best  for  him,  and  to  no  pur- 
pose. A  student  of  acknowledged  stand- 
ing in  athletics  and  in  personal  charac- 
ter appears  at  the  office,  and  says,  "  I 
should  like  to  see  whether  I  can  make 
that  man  work  and  keep  him  straight." 
This,  or  something  like  this,  occurs  so 
often  that  it  is  an  important  part  of  the 
college  life.  Moreover,  when  the  strong 
man  comes,  he  does  not  come  with  the 
foolish  notion  that  he  shall  help  the  weak 
man  in  the  eyes  of  the  college  office  by 
pretending  that  he  is  not  weak.  He  takes 
the  case  as  it  stands,  knowing  that  his 
own  purpose  and  that  of  the  college  of- 
fice are  one  and  the  same,  —  to  keep  the 
student,  if  he  can  be  made  into  a  man, 
and  otherwise  in  all  kindness  to  send 
him  home. 


COLLEGE  LIFE  207 

One  more  responsibility  needs  men- 
tioning here,  —  responsibility  to  our 
work.  In  college,  it  is  said,  a  man  of 
fair  capacity  may  do  well  one  thing 
beside  his  college  work,  and  one  thing 
only.  Those  of  us  who  are  so  fortunate 
as  to  earn  our  own  living  must  spend 
most  of  our  waking  hours  in  work.  It 
follows  that  we  must  learn  to  enjoy  work 
or  be  unhappy.  Now  we  learn  to  enjoy 
work  by  working ;  to  get  interested  in 
any  task  by  doing  it  with  all  our  strength. 
This  is  the  first  lesson  of  scholarship : 
without  it  we  cannot  be  scholars;  and 
only  by  courtesy  can  we  be  called  stu- 
dents. This  is  the  first  lesson  of  happy 
activity  in  life.  In  athletics,  in  music, 
in  study,  in  business,  we  "train"  our- 
selves toward  the  free  exercise  of  our 
best  powers,  toward  the  joy  that  comes  of 
mastery.  A  college  oarsman  once  de- 
clared that  after  a  season  on  the  slides  he 
felt  able  to  undertake  anything.  The  in- 
tellectual interests  of  a  modem  university 


208         THE   MISTAKES   OF 

are  bewildering  and  intense.  Among 
them  every  intelligent  youth  can  find 
something  worthy  of  his  best  labors, 
something  in  which  his  best  labors  will 
yield  enjoyment  beyond  price.  Right- 
minded  students  see  the  noble  oppor- 
tunity in  a  college  life ;  and  there  is  no 
sadder  sight  than  the  blindness  of  those 
who  do  not  see  it  until  it  is  lost  for- 
ever. 

While  speaking  of  the  intellectual 
side  of  college  life,  I  may  warn  students 
against  becoming  specialists  too  early. 
Every  study  has  some  connection  with 
every  other  and  gets  some  light  from 
it ;  but  a  specialty,  seriously  undertaken, 
compels  a  close  study  of  itself,  and  may 
leave  little  time  for  other  study.  An  un- 
enlightened specialist  is  a  narrow  being ; 
and  he  who  becomes  an  exclusive  spe- 
cialist before  he  has  been  in  college  two 
years  is  usually  unenlightened.  Even 
after  the  choice  of  a  specialty,  a  stu- 
dent, like  a  professional  man,  may  wisely 


COLLEGE   LIFE  209 

reserve  one  corner  of  his  mind  for  some- 
thing totally  different  from  his  specialty, 
and  may  find  in  that  little  corner  a  relief 
which  makes  him  a  better  specialist.  It 
is  good  for  a  man  buried  in  a  chemical 
laboratory  to  take  a  course  in  English 
poetry;  it  is  good  for  a  man  steeped 
in  literature  to  have  a  mild  infusion  of 
chemistry. 

The  lazy  student  (if  I  may  return  to 
him  now)  finds  the  thread  of  his  study 
broken  by  his  frequent  absences  from 
the  lecture  room,  and  finds  the  lecture 
hour  a  long,  dull  period  of  hard  seats  and 
wandering  thoughts.  Note-taking  would 
shorten  the  hour,  soften  the  seats,  sim- 
plify the  subject,  and  make  the  whole 
situation  vastly  more  interesting.  No 
matter  if  some  clever  students  are  willing 
to  sell  him  notes,  and  he  has  no  scruples 
about  buying  them  ;  the  mere  process 
of  note-taking,  apart  from  the  education 
and  training  in  it,  gives  him  something 
to  do  in  the  lecture  room,  makes  it  im- 


210          THE  MISTAKES   OF 

possible  for  him  not  to  know  something 
of  the  subject,  and  shortens  his  period 
of  cramming  for  examination.  I  believe, 
further,  that  a  student's  happiness  is  in- 
creased by  a  time-table  of  regular  hours 
for  work  in  each  study.  The  prepara- 
tion of  theses,  and  the  necessity  of  using 
library  books  when  other  people  are  not 
using  them,  make  it  hard  now  and  then 
to  follow  a  time-table  strictly  ;  but  in  gen- 
eral such  a  table  is  a  wonderful  saver  of 
time.  If  a  student  leaves  one  lecture 
room  at  ten  and  goes  to  another  at  twelve 
and  has  no  idea  what  he  wishes  to  do 
between  ten  and  twelve,  he  is  likely  to 
do  nothing.  Even  if  he  has  determined 
to  study,  he  loses  time  in  getting  under 
way  —  in  deciding  what  to  study.  Work 
with  a  time-table  tends  to  promptness  in 
transition ;  and  when  the  time-table  for 
the  day  is  carried  out,  the  free  hours  are 
truly  free,  a  time  of  clear  and  well-earned 
recreation.  At  school  the  morning  rou- 
tine is  prescribed  by  the  teacher.  At  col- 


COLLEGE   LIFE  211 

lege,  where  it  should  be  prescribed  by 
the  student,  it  frequently  breaks  down. 
A  man's  freedom,  as  viewed  with  a  boy's 
eyes,  is  liberty  to  waste  time  :  it  is  the 
luxury  of  spending  the  best  morning 
hours  in  a  billiard  room,  or  loafing  in  a 
classmate's  "  study ;  "  the  joy  of  hearing 
the  bell  ring  and  ring  for  you,  while  you 
sit  high  above  the  slaves  of  toil  and  puff 
the  smoke  of  cigarettes  with  the  superb 
indifference  of  a  small  cloud-compelling 
Zeus.  The  peculiar  evil  in  cigarettes 
I  leave  for  scientific  men  to  explain ;  I 
know  merely  that  among  college  stu- 
dents the  excessive  cigarette  smokers  are 
recognized  even  by  other  smokers  as  re- 
presenting the  feeblest  form  of  intellec- 
tual and  moral  life.  At  their  worst  they 
have  no  backbone  ;  they  cannot  tell  (and 
possibly  cannot  see)  the  truth  ;  and  they 
loaf.  Senator  Hoar,  in  an  address  to 
Harvard  students,  remarked  that  in  his 
judgment  the  men  who  succeed  best  in 
life  are  the  men  who  have  made  the  best 


212         THE   MISTAKES   OF 

use  of  the  odd  moments  at  college,  and 
that,  contrary  to  the  general  opinion,  it  is 
worse  to  loaf  in  college  than  to  loaf  in  a 
professional  school.  The  young  lawyer, 
he  observed,  who  has  neglected  the  law 
may  make  up  his  deficiencies  in  the 
early  years  of  his  practice;  "he  will 
have  plenty  of  time  then :  "  but  there  is 
no  recovery  of  the  years  thrown  away  at 
college. 

Once  more,  if  we  could  only  teach  by 
the  experience  of  others,  we  should  save 
untold  misery.  I  met  not  long  since  a 
young  business  man  who  had  been  for 
four  years  on  and  off  probation  in  Har- 
vard College  and  had  not  yet  received  his 
degree.  In  college  he  had  seemed  dull. 
He  probably  thought  he  worked,  because 
his  life  was  broken  into,  more  or  less,  by 
college  exercises,  which  he  attended  with 
some  regularity.  Now  he  is  really  work- 
ing, with  no  time  to  make  up  college  defi- 
ciencies, ready  to  admit  that  in  college 
he  hardly  knew  the  meaning  of  work, 


COLLEGE   LIFE  213 

and  to  say  simply  and  spontaneously,  "I 
made  a  fool  of  myself  in  college."  An- 
other student,  who  did  nothing  in  his 
studies,  who  spent  four  or  five  thousand 
dollars  a  year,  and  who  constantly  hired 
tutors  to  do  his  thinking,  was  finally 
expelled  because  he  got  a  substitute  to 
write  an  examination  for  him.  Home 
trouble  followed  college  trouble  ;  he  was 
thrown  on  himself  and  into  the  cold 
world ;  and  he  became  a  man.  From 
scrubbing  street  cars,  he  was  promoted 
to  running  them  ;  from  running  them  to 
holding  a  place  of  trust  with  men  to  do 
his  orders.  "  Every  day,"  he  said,  "  I 
feel  the  need  of  what  I  threw  away  at 
college.  Do  you  think  if  I  came  back  I 
should  need  any  more  tutors  ?  I  'd  go 
through  quicker  than  anything,  with  no- 
body to  help  me.  What  sent  me  away 
was  the  one  dishonest  thing  in  my  life." 
The  dishonest  thing  came  about  through 
loafing. 

Even  socially,  as  I  have  intimated,  the 


214          THE   MISTAKES  OF 

loafer  seldom  or  never  wins  the  highest 
college  success.  Graduating  classes  be- 
stow their  honors  on  men  who  have 
"  done  something,"  —  athletics,  college 
journalism,  debating,  if  you  will,  not 
necessarily  hard  study  in  the  college 
course,  but  hard  and  devoted  work  in 
something,  and  work  with  an  unselfish 
desire  to  help  the  college  and  the  class. 
At  Harvard  College  in  the  class  of  1899 
all  three  marshals  graduated  with  dis- 
tinction in  their  studies.  By  the  begin- 
ning of  the  Senior  year  the  class  knows 
the  men  to  be  relied  on,  the  men  who 
are  "there,"  and  knows  that  they  are 
men  of  active  life. 

I  have  spoken  earlier  of  a  student's 
responsibility  to  some  unknown  girl  who 
is  to  be  his  wife.  What  is  his  respon- 
sibility to  a  known  girl  with  whom 
in  college  days  he  falls  in  love?  Just 
as  college  Faculties  are  blind  to  the  ef- 
fect of  social  ambition  in  students,  they 
are  blind  to  the  effect  of  sweethearts.  I 


COLLEGE  LIFE  215 

do  not  quite  know  what  they  could  do 
if  their  eyes  were  opened ;  for  college 
rules,  happily,  must  be  independent 
of  sweethearts.  I  mean  merely  that 
scores  of  cases  in  which  students  break 
rules,  "  cut "  lectures,  disappear  for  a 
day  or  two  without  permission,  and 
do  other  things  that  look  rebellious, 
are  readily  accounted  for  by  the  disqui- 
eting influence  of  girls.  What  students 
do  (or  don't)  when  they  are  in  love  is 
a  pretty  good  test  of  their  character. 
One  drops  his  work  altogether,  and  de- 
votes what  time  he  cannot  spend  with 
the  girl  to  meditating  upon  her.  He  can 
think  of  nothing  else ;  and  accordingly 
for  her  sake  he  becomes  useless.  Another 
sets  his  teeth,  and  works  hard.  "  She  is," 
he  says  naturally  enough,  "infinitely 
above  me.  How  She  ever  can  care  for 
me,  I  do  not  know  ;  whether  She  ever 
will,  I  do  not  know ;  but  I  will  be  what 
I  can  and.  do  what  I  can.  I  will  do  what- 
ever I  do  as  if  I  were  doing  it  for  Her. 


216          THE  MISTAKES  OF 

I  am  doing  it  for  Her.  If  I  succeed,  it 
will  be  through  Her ;  if  my  success  pleases 
Her,  I  shall  be  repaid." 

No  girl  worth  having  will  think  better 
of  a  man  for  shirking  his  plain  duty  in 
order  to  hang  about  her.  No  girl  likes 
a  "  quitter ; "  and  most  girls  agree  with 
the  heroine  of  Mr.  Kipling's  beautiful 
story,  "William  the  Conqueror,"  when 
she  says,  "  I  like  men  who  do  things." 
The  story  shows  with  profound  and  ex- 
quisite truth  how  two  persons  of  strong 
character  may  grow  into  each  other's 
love  and  into  an  understanding  of  it  by 
doing  their  separate  duties.  To  go  on, 
girl  or  no  girl,  without  excuses  small  or 
great ;  to  do  the  appointed  task  and  to 
do  it  cheerfully  amid  all  distractions,  all 
sorrows,  all  heartaches ;  to  make  routine 
(not  blind  but  enlightened  routine)  your 
friend  —  thus  it  is  that  by  and  by  when 
you  meet  the  hard  blows  of  the  world 
you  can 

"  Go  labor  on ;  spend  and  be  spent." 


COLLEGE  LIFE  217 

Thus  it  is  that  you  find  the  strength 
which  is  born  of  trained  capacity  for  in- 
terest in  daily  duty. 

On  the  banks  of  the  Connecticut  is  a 
school  without  a  loafer  in  it.  The  schol- 
ars are  needy  for  the  most  part,  and  so 
grimly  in  earnest  that  only  a  printed 
regulation  restrains  them  from  getting 
up  "  before  5  A.  M."  without  permission. 
I  am  far  from  recommending  study  be- 
fore breakfast,  or  loss  of  the  night's  sleep ; 
but  I  admire  the  whole-hearted  energy 
with  which  these  boys  and  grown  men 
seize  the  opportunity  of  their  lives.  I 
admire  the  same  energy  in  athletics,  if  a 
student  will  only  remember  that  his  ath- 
letics are  for  his  college,  not  his  college 
for  his  athletics. 

One  more  caution  for  college  life  and 
for  after  life.  Do  not  let  your  ideals  get 
shopworn.  Keep  the  glory  of  your  youth. 
A  man  with  no  visions,  be  he  young  or 
old,  is  a  poor  thing.  There  is  no  place 
like  a  college  for  visions  and  ideals ;  and 


2i8          THE  MISTAKES  OF 

it  is  through  our  visions,  through  our 
ideals,  that  we  keep  high  our  standard 
of  character  and  life.  No  man's  charac- 
ter is  fixed ;  and  no  responsible  man  is 
overconfident  of  his  own.  It  is  the  part 
of  every  boy  when  he  arrives  at  man- 
hood to  recognize  as  one  of  his  greatest 
dangers  the  fading  of  the  vision,  and  to 
set  himself  against  this  danger  with  all 
his  might  It  is  only  the  man  with  ideals 
who  is  founded  on  a  rock,  and  resists  the 
rains  and  the  floods. 

A  vigorous  young  fellow,  fresh  from 
college,  went  into  a  business  house  at 
four  dollars  a  week,  and  rapidly  rose 
to  a  well-paid  and  responsible  position. 
One  day  he  received  from  a  member  of 
the  firm  an  order  to  do  something  that 
he  thought  dishonorable.  He  showed 
the  order  to  the  member  of  the  firm 
whom  he  knew  best,  and  asked  him 
what  he  thought  of  it. 

"Come  and  dine  with  me,"  said  his 
patron,  "  and  we  will  talk  it  over." 


COLLEGE  LIFE  219 

"  Excuse  me,"  said  the  young  man. 
"Any  other  day  I  should  be  glad  to 
dine  with  you ;  but  this  matter  is  busi- 
ness." 

"Look!"  said  the  other.  "Business 
is  war ;  and  if  you  do  not  do  these  things 
in  business,  you  can't  live." 

"I  don't  believe  it,"  said  the  young 
man.  "  If  I  did,  I  should  n't  be  here.  I 
leave  your  employ  Saturday  night ; "  — 
and,  to  the  amazement  of  the  firm,  he 
left  it  forever. 

"  And  virtue's  whole  sum  is  but  know  and  dare," 

said  a  great  poet  in  one  of  his  great- 
est moments.  It  takes  a  man  with  ideals 
to  begin  all  over  again,  abandoning  the 
kind  of  work  in  which  he  has  won  con- 
spicuous success,  and  abandoning  it  be- 
cause he  finds  that  its  methods,  though 
accepted  by  business  men  generally,  are 
for  him  dishonorable. 

In  and  out  of  college  the  man  with 
ideals  helps,  so  far  as  in  him  lies,  his 


220         THE  MISTAKES  OF 

college  and  his  country.  It  is  hard  for  a 
boy  to  understand  that  in  life,  whatever 
he  does,  he  helps  to  make  or  mar  the  name 
of  his  college.  I  have  said  "  in  life  "  —  I 
may  say  also  "  in  death."  Not  long  since, 
I  saw  a  Harvard  Senior  on  what  proved 
to  be  his  death-bed.  The  people  at  the 
hospital  declared  that  they  had  never 
seen  such  pain  borne  with  such  fortitude, 
—  "  and,"  said  the  Medical  Visitor  of  the 
University,  "  he  was  through  it  all  such 
a  gentleman."  A  day  or  two  before  his 
death  an  attendant  asked  him  whether 
he  felt  some  local  pain.  "  I  did  not,"  said 
he,  "until  you  gave  me  that  medicine." 
Then  instantly  he  added,  miserably  weak 
and  suffering  as  he  was,  "  I  beg  your 
pardon.  You  know  and  I  don't.  It  may 
be  the  medicine  had  nothing  to  do  with 
my  pain."  I  believe  no  man  or  woman 
in  the  ward  saw  that  boy  die  without 
seeing  also  a  new  meaning  and  a  new 
beauty  in  the  college  whose  name  he 
bore.  As  has  often  been  said,  the  youth 


COLLEGE   LIFE  221 

who  loves  his  Alma  Mater  will  always 
ask,  not  "  What  can  she  do  for  me  ?"  but 
"  What  can  I  do  for  her  ?  " 

Responsibility  is  —  first,  last,  and  al- 
ways —  the  burden  of  my  song,  a  stu- 
dent's responsibility  to  home,  to  fellow 
students,  to  school,  to  college,  and  (let 
me  add  once  more)  to  the  girl  whom  he 
will  ask  some  day  to  be  his  wife.  "  Moral 
taste,"  as  Miss  Austen  calls  it,  is  no- 
thing without  moral  force.  "If,"  said  a 
college  President  to  a  Freshman  class, 
"  you  so  live  that  in  a  few  years  you  will 
be  a  fit  companion  for  an  intellectual, 
high-minded,  pure-hearted  woman,  you 
will  not  go  far  wrong."  Keep  her  in 
mind  always,  or,  if  you  are  not  imagina- 
tive enough  for  that,  remember  that  the 
lines 

"  No  spring  nor  summer's  beauty  hath  such  grace 
As  I  have  seen  in  one  autumnal  face  " 

were  written  of  a  good  man's  mother. 


MATER  FORTISSIMA 


MATER   FORTISSIMA 

PHI  BETA  KAPPA  POEM,  CAMBRIDGE,  JUNE  25,  1903 

AGAIN  the  song  the  fathers  sang  before  us  ! 

The  cheer  that  rings  through  voice  and  heart 

again ! 
The  multitudinous  triumphant  chorus  ! 

The  mighty  mother  marshalling  her  men ! 

"Come — for   behold    the    East   and  West   are 

merging ; 

The  frozen  Arctic  greets  the  scorching  Line  ; 
Come,  like  the  waves  on  strong  New   England 

surging ; 
Come,  for  to-day  the  seas  and  skies  are  mine !  " 

And  we,  who  own  no  queen  on  earth  above  her, 
We,  who  from  boyhood  know  her  sovereign 
sway, 

Her  sons,  her  knights,  and  every  knight  her  lover, 
Her  minute-men  —  we  hear  her  and  obey. 

A  thousand  more  their  loyal  vows  have  plighted ; 
A  thousand  more  low  at  her  feet  have  kneeled ; 


226        MATER   FORTISSIMA 

And  every  man,  upspringing  newly  knighted, 
Hath  lifted  high  God's  truth  upon  his  shield. 

And  she,  who  wears  the  wisdom  of  the  ages, 
She,  who  in  everlasting  youth  abides, 

She,  who  her  sons,  the  heroes,  martyrs,  sages, 
From  youth  to  manhood  and  to  glory  guides,  — 

"  Go  forth,"  she  cries,  "  from  strength  to  strength 
forever ; 

Serve  me  by  serving  God  and  man,"  she  saith ; 
"  Steadfast,  upright,  of  strong  and  high  endeavor, 

Fear  nothing,  and  be  faithful  unto  death." 


For  the  message  of  the  Master 

Down  the  centuries  has  rolled  ; 

And  the  Pilgrims  heard  the  burning  word 

Like  Evangelists  of  old ; 

In  the  cabin  of  the  Mayflower, 
When  the  northwind  swept  the  seas, 
In  tongues  of  flame  the  message  came 
To  the  women  on  their  knees ; 

To  the  fathers  of  New  England, 

To  the  bold  men  of  the  Bay, 

Who  lodged  in  the  lair  of  the  wolf  and  the  bear, 

And  the  red  man  fierce  as  they ; 


MATER   FORTISSIMA        227 

And  the  grave  young  scholar  hearkened 
To  the  Master's  high  behest 
As  he  watched  the  day  fly  far  away 
To  the  darkness  of  the  west. 

And  westward  still  he  watches, 
The  width  of  our  wide  land, 
As  he  sits  alone  on  a  pillar  of  stone 
With  his  Bible  in  his  hand. 

Be  it  mountain,  lake,  or  prairie, 

Be  it  city  strong  and  fair, 

Be  it  east  or  west  that  his  eyes  shall  rest, 

He  sees  New  England  there. 

Be  it  east  or  west  that  his  eyes  shall  rest, 
New  England  stands  the  same  ; 
For  God  and  the  right,  at  the  front  of  the  fight 
Are  the  men  that  bear  her  name. 

For  the  message  of  the  Master 
She  has  breathed  with  every  breath ; 
And  come  what  will,  New  England  still 
Shall  be  faithful  unto  death. 


Harvard,  all  hail  to  the  mother  that  reared  thee, 
Mother  whose  grace   and  whose  glory  thou 
art! 


228        MATER  FORTISSIMA 

Hail  to  New  England,  who  loved  thee  and  cheered 

thee, 
Nestling  thee  close  to  her  heroine's  heart ! 

Here  in  the  wilderness  bravely  she  bore  thee, 
Guarded  thee,  guided  thee,  prayed   for  thee 

then: 
"  God  in  the  pillar  of  fire  be  before  thee ; 

Child  of  New  England,  be  mother  of  men  ! 

"  Men  who  shall  live  in  the  light  of  thy  vision, 

Men  who  shall  welcome  at  duty's  command 
Riches  or  poverty,  praise  or  derision  — 
Men  who  shall  work,  with  the  head  and  the 
hand: 

"  Not  the  dull  heart  of  the  meaningless  stoic ; 

Quick  with  the  fires  of  unquenchable  youth, 
Quivering  yet  calm,  like  the  martyrs  heroic, 
Living  or  dying,  triumphant  in  truth." 

From  the  North,  from  the  South,  from  the  East, 

from  the  West, 
They  come,  to  be  born  again ; 
To  the  North,  to  the  South,  to  the  East,  to  the  West, 
They  go,  to  prove  them  men. 
In  the  field,  at  the  desk,  at  the  court,  in  the  mart, 
With  the  joy  in  their  eyes  and  the  fire  in  their  heart, 
To  struggle,  to  strive,  to  obey,  to  command, 
To  work,  and  to  leaven  the  land. 


MATER   FORTISSIMA        229 

When  the  trumpet  blew  a  shriller  blast 

And  the  loud  alarum  rang, 
Marching,  galloping,  thick  and  fast, 
Forward,  forward,  on  to  the  last, 

Forward  again  they  sprang ! 
Wounded  and  bleeding  and  dying  and  dead  — 
On  to  the  last  where  the  captain  led, 
Bursting  the  battlements  overhead 

Where  the  biting  bullets  sang. 

Danger  and  death  and  devotion  they  saw ; 

Harvard  had  heroes  then : 
Perkins  and  Dalton  and  Savage  and  Shaw, 

Lowell,  and  Lowell  again  ; 
First  in  counsel  and  first  to  ride 
To  death  as  the  bridegroom  to  meet  the  bride  — 

Lovers  and  leaders  of  men. 

There  is  one  who  knew  them  and  loved  them  well, 

Never  a  braver  than  he. 
Like  them  he  fought  and  like  them  he  fell : 
Yet  he  lives  to  wear  with  a  soldier's  grace 
The  scar  of  the  sword-cut  on  his  face  ; 
He  lives  to  work  in  the  wondrous  light 
That  shone  for  the  shepherds  on  Christmas  night ; 
With  heart  to  love  and  with  hand  to  guide 
He  nobly  lives  as  he  would  have  died, 
For  the  truth  that  makes  men  free. 


230        MATER   FORTISSIMA 

The  truth  that  makes  men  free  —  there  came  a  seer 
With  radiant  smile,  whose  eyes  profound  and  keen 
Burnt  through  the  mist  that  shrouds  the  wildering 

scene, 

Of  love  and  life  and  death,  and  saw  them  clear 
As  noonday ;  who,  serenely  standing  near 
To  the  great  heart  of  Nature,  banished  fear 
From  all  that  knew  his  presence.   Where  he  trod 
Is  hallowed  ground ;  for,  lo,  he  walked  with  God. 

The  truth  that  makes  men  free — behold,  there  came 

A  prophet  with  the  poet's  noblest  art, 

In  stature  like  a  giant,  and  in  heart 

Wide  as  the  world,  with  lips  and  soul  aflame 

Christ  and  His  church  forever  to  proclaim  ; 

Impetuous,  kingly,  true,  whose  very  name 

Wrought  righteousness,  whose  sweet  and  surging 

voice 
Lifted  the  saddened  soul  to  wonder  and  rejoice. 

The  truth  that  makes  men  free  —  the  scholar  sweet 
Who  taught  us  how  the  daisy's  poet  sang, 
Whose  vibrant  voice  in  mirth  or  sadness  rang 
Out  from  the  warmest  heart  that  ever  beat. 
Quick,  generous,  open,  learned  —  him  we  greet 
Once  more  in  June,  with  roses  at  his  feet, 
To  learn  of  him  who  knew  as  none  shall  know 
The  brave  and  simple  songs  of  long  ago. 


MATER  FORTISSIMA        231 

Harvard  has  heroes  yet ;  unspotted,  brave, 
Free-hearted,  strong,  rejoicing  still  in  youth, 

Even  here  the  leader  of  our  nation  gave 
His  vow  to  live  for  righteousness  and  truth. 

Harvard  has  heroes  yet ;  supreme,  victorious, 
Leader  of  leaders  in  the  nation's  van, 

Marching  erect,  behold  her  captain  glorious 
Who  gives  his  life  to  freedom  and  to  man. 


From  the  North,  from  the  South,  from  the  East, 

from  the  West, 
They  come,  to  be  born  again ; 
To  the  north,  to  the  South,  to  the  East,  to  the 

West, 

They  go,  to  prove  them  men. 
In  the  field,  at  the  desk,  at  the  court,  in  the  mart, 
With  the  joy  in  their  eyes  and  the  fire  in  their 

heart, 

To  struggle,  to  strive,  to  obey,  to  command, 
To  work,  and  to  leaven  the  land. 


Again  the  song  the  fathers  sang  before  us  ! 

The  cheer  that  rings  through  voice  and  heart 

again ! 
The  multitudinous,  triumphant  chorus  ! 

The  mighty  mother  marshalling  her  men ! 


232        MATER  FORTISSIMA 

O  mother  whose  benignant  arms  enfold  us, 
O  heart  of  all  New  England,  bravest,  best, 

Whose  voice,  forever  strong  and  sweet,  hath  told 

us 
That  life  is  work  and  work  alone  is  rest, 

God  be  thy  guide  as  onward  still  thou  f arest ; 

Still  breathe  upon  thy  sons  the  hero's  breath ; 
And  still,  as  high  and  higher  yet  thou  darest, 1 

Fear  nothing ;  "  be  thou  faithful  unto  death." 

1  "  Altiora  semper  audes 
Exitu  cum  prospero." 

Professor  J.  B.  Greenough  : 
Harvard  Hymn. 


(JCbe 

Eltctrotyped  and  printed  by  H.  O.  Houghton  &  C». 
Cambridge,  Mass.,  U.S.  A. 


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"The  names,  bright  in  themselves,  Dr.  Gladden  makes 
luminous  by  his  revelations  of  the  character  of  each."  —  Phil- 
adelphia Telegraph.  Illustrated.  I2mo,  $1.25,  net.  Postpaid, 


At  all  Bookstores.    Sent  on  receipt  of  price  by  the  Publishers. 

HOUGHTON,  MIFFLIN    &   COMPANY 

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MAY  04  2000 


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